Purchased this as a dashcam solution for my new sporty-type car to detail the travels we're going to have.The product arrived on time and in good shape. Nice solid packaging. Received an e-mail from ElectroFlip advising that they were "going green" and that the documentation was on their web side. A couple of nice links were provided. So far, so good.
Opened product and reviewed contents. All appeared to be present and in workable condition. I set about laying out the product in an organized manner to proceed with review and assembly.
Issue #1: Battery compartment door is VERY difficult to open and require the gentle use of my knife (Gibb's Rule #9: Never go anywhere without a knife). Used sharp edge to release the door catches and, voila, the battery compartment was open. Inserted battery and connecte provided cable to cam and laptop USB ports to charge the battery.
Issue #2: Windshield camera mount is made plastice with metal hardware (screws and nuts). The screw making up the cam mount point is set in plastic at, what I thought at time, a tight a secure position. As Lee Corso often says, "Not so fast, my friend". Whilst attaching cam to cam mount and attaching the assembly to windshield, while adjusting the angle of the cam to look straight ahead, the screw in the mount point became separated and cam ended up on my dashboard. To correct this, I replaced the screw into its original upright position and applied Super Glue to secure said miscreant screw. All secure now.
Issue #3: Once the battery was charged up through the USB port, I turned on the cam to check out the little bit of video I recorded. This seemed straight forward, up until the point Windoze wants to load the device driver for the storage device (32GB SD/MMC). This all looked good until the system complained "Device driver software was not successfully loaded". The result is that I cannot see the iDrive2 as a disk drive to view files. Used the ElectroFlip "Knowledge Base" to research this anomaly, but nothing was found. I then submitted a message to ElectroFlip Support using their web form. Next business day, I was advised via e-mail of two solutions: "When connecting the iDrive 2 to your computer make sure that the device is turned off. However, there are instances that the computer will not be able to successfully download the driver required for the device which is normal and does not mean that the device is defective. This normally happens when the computer does not have the updated driver compatible for the device. If in any case this happens you may just use a card reader to view and transfer the recorded video on your computer." Helpful and informative. It also resolved my issue.
Issue #4: Random lockups and non-responsive behavior. No real pattern as of yet and I cannot easily reproduce the behavior. These lockups and non-responsive behaviors are easily resolved by opening the battery compartment and performing a hard power cycle (much like a WindowsME PC use to be).
Overall, not that impressed. But, I that could change over the next couple of weeks as I put it to more rigorous use. On the plus side, by two interations with ElectroFlip (once voice and one e-mail) were pleasant and very helpful. Too bad the product isnt as good as the people who work there.
I am half tempted to get a GoPro3 and see how it fairs.
See ya in the funny papers.
*****UPDATE******12/24/2012******
Still "working on it". After some fiddlin', I'm starting to figure it out. Not a bad product, but the lack of documentation is bothersome. Thanks God for "poke and hope". So far, I've been able to chronicle my ongoing mission to explore new worlds from the captain's seat of my 'vette. Thanks to video editor, I have some interesting short vids soon to be posted on YouTube.
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