The latest gadget craze to hit town features tiny, super-light, toylike digital cameras that look as though they are made by Fisher-Price. The selling point isn't the technology - these cameras are designed to be cute and trendy so that owners will wear them round their necks like a fashion accessory.
In my opinion, these cheesy-looking cameras are a waste of time and money because they have such low resolution - typically 1.3 megapixels - that you are better off using a disposable camera. But I don't belong to the target group so I had to talk to a couple of people to find out what the appeal is.
'It's fun to take pictures or movie clips of your friends when you are going out. It is so light and the design is hip,' said Suky Li, an avid party-goer in her late 20s. She bought a Sony CyberShot U10 on a recent trip to Japan and they have been inseparable since. One of her friends, May Lo, had just put in an order for the same camera at Broadway in Times Square.
'I like it very much. It's not expensive. I have been thinking of buying a digital camera for a long time but most are quite ugly. This one is so light and the design is trendy,' she said.
These cute cameras do not sport the latest digital imaging technology, there are few zoom features and the resolution isn't impressive, but they are popular social tools for young users. As with Polaroids, they can view pictures immediately.
Japanese and Taiwanese electronics manufacturers have been flooding the market with these candy-like cams. Besides Sony's HK$1,990 unit, Toshiba is selling a two-megapixel one that looks like a perfume dispenser called the Sora T20. It has an SD slot, a 2x optical zoom and weighs 170 grams. The Sora T20 also has PDA-like features so that you can annotate pictures with illustrations and captions using a stylus.