Sony Bloggie

» see sony.com/electronics/bloggie as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

i missed the bloggie completely. by 2010 my phone shot 720p clips that uploaded straight from the device. the pocket-camcorder window opened around 2007 with the flip and was effectively closed by 2012. sony's bloggie was a credible piece of hardware that arrived at the end of the category's natural life.

sony launched the webbie hd mhs-pm1 in late 2008 with a 270-degree rotating lens and 1080p capture. the line was rebranded bloggie at ces in january 2010, betting that the youtube-vlog wave needed a dedicated tool. the bloggie touch followed in late 2010 with a 3-inch capacitive screen. the bloggie live, reviewed at ces 2012, added wi-fi and live-streaming over ustream.

sony quietly dropped the line in early 2012. cisco shut down the flip in april 2011 after paying $590 million for pure digital, and the bloggie outlived its main competitor by less than a year because the smartphone had become a strictly better device. the iphone 4s shipped in october 2011 with 1080p capture for free with every contract, and any vlogger who needed something better went straight to a real mirrorless body.

~ the record ~

~ what got buried with it ~

the bloggie's most interesting feature was the 360-degree mode shipped on the bloggie 3d and the bloggie sport, well before consumer 360 video became a category. the sensor and the optical chain were already there. nobody built a viewer that mattered until samsung gear 360 and ricoh theta several years later. by then the bloggie hardware had been recycled and the brand was gone.

~ the postmortem ~

sony's exit from pocket camcorders foreshadowed the broader collapse of the consumer camera market between 2011 and 2015. compact cameras shipped 122 million units in 2010 and fell under 15 million by 2018. the bloggie was an early casualty of a much larger extinction event, killed less by a single competitor than by everyone owning a camera-equipped supercomputer in their pocket.

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