The SV-AV10 is a gadgeteer's gadget; it takes the four most popular gadgets of the past few years and bundles them into a single pocket sized gizmo.
Panasonic's latest e.wear gadget is its most ambitious; it's a combined video camera, still digital camera, voice recorder and audio player. That's a lot of functionality to cram into a gadget that measures in at 28x50x87mm and weighs only 98g.
In order to get all that functionality into a unit this small, sacrifices have had to be made. Depending on what you actually want the SV-AV10 to be, you may find the unit more or less appealing.
The storage basis of the SV-AV10 is SD Flash Memory, like the rest of the e.wear range. SD cards typically cost a little more than their non-secure MMC counterparts, which is a consideration for anyone thinking of purchasing the SV-AV10. The unit ships with a titchy 8MB card, which is fine for the digital camera portion of the unit, but exceedingly small if you're looking at the video or MP3 playback features.
One thing that the SV-AV10 does very well is attract attention; as we tested the unit around the ZDNet offices, we drew a lot of stares, a few people shying away and an awful lot of exclamations of the "That isn't a video camera is it?" style. With the 2-inch LCD screen flipped out that's exactly what it resembles, although the build quality could use some work. Every e.wear product we've looked at has had a flimsy SD card slot, but the one on the AV10 deserves special mention, as you can't open it without folding out the LCD as well, which we found a touch annoying.
All of the SV-AV10's features are controlled via the LCD menu; playback and recording of voice, MP3, still and video camera shots. Once you get beyond the initial pretty record/playback interface however, everything looks like it fell off the back of a truck labelled "DOS 6.22". Files, be they video, audio, picture or MP3 are all listed in a simple cascading list, and menu options are scattered all over the place. Most menu functions require multiple button presses, which limits the spontaneity with which you can employ the unit.
MP3 playback is the SV-AV10's weakest feature. Like the similar e.wear players, content is transferred via Panasonic Media Manager -- known to the rest of the world as RealJukebox. Once you've transferred over your music of choice, however, there's precious little you can do with it on the SV-AV10. Playback options run the gamut of endless looping -- and that's it. No graphic equalisers, no randomisation functions, nothing resembling a playlist. Pressing the mode button brings up the volume control, which is then adjusted via the jog dial. Volume steps are incredibly discrete; it took us a good fifteen seconds to ramp the audio volume up to full. Full volume is quite mild for an MP3 device; in fact we found it to be a quite good train volume. The other catch with MP3 playback is the size of the supplied storage; 8MB will get you a touch less than ten minutes of decent quality MP3 playback time.
