Live Stuff: hands-on with Kodak’s Bluetooth V610

Scroll down for the latest updates and a photo of the camera.

We’re expecting to find out details on Kodak’s second dual lens camera in a sec – keep your browsers refreshed….

11.50 Lot of talk about the fact that none of us are organising our images on our PCs. Are we about to suffer a dull software annoucement?

11.51 V610 held up – it looks exactly like the V570. The headline here, though, is that it’s also got Blueooth so it’ll be able to print direct to Kodak photo kiosks, beam images to smartphones and, well, anything else with Bluetooth.

11.55 It has the equivalent of a 10x optical zoom: mighty impressive for such a small cam.

11.57 Version 6 of Kodak’s Easyshare is now available. The improvements? Slightly cleaner interface and better online uploading to Kodak’s gallery.

12.00 Alex from the Proud Galleries is up on stage. He’s been playing with the V610. Lucky chap.

12.02 He likes the styling. Apparently it’s quick on the start-up.

12.04 Incidentally, it’s the same size as the V570. We’re now having a look at some pics of Alex’s snaps – he’s been doing lots of shots into the sun and using the 10x zoom on auto.

12.06 Up on screen is a decent panoramic shot stitched together by the V610. No surprises there – the V570’s panoramic mode was one of our favourite features of the old cam.

12.07 More pics. What we want to know: can you upload pics to the web via Bluetooth and a phone?

12.09 Good snap from Alex of Arsene Wenger looking gutted. Er, can we have the specs now, please?

12.15 According to web forums, the camera’s a 6MP affair. Confirmation in a minute.

12.19 Video on the future of digital photography from a bloke in New York. Talking about lots of ‘auto correction’ for all our photos in-camera: a kinda freaky prospect for those of us who like to do that ourselves.

12.21 News on a imminent Kodak service called Konga – looks like photos via RSS, a la Flickr.

12.25 Futurology boy’s talking about meta data! Yes, the joyous information that makes it easier to search out pics after you’ve shot them. Apparently Kodak’s going to add GPS and face recognition (check out Riya for a real world example now). So where’s the GPS digicam, big K?

12.26 It’s demo time. We’ll back in twenty mins with a hands-on.

12.35 So….we’ve been having a play. It’s got a 6MP sensor, a pretty generous 2.8in LCD viewfinder and – contrary to what we said earlier – is a tad bigger than the V570.

The zoom is great but it’s tricky holding the camera still when you’re zoomed in to 10x – the camera’s small and wobbles even in two hands. Next up, Bluetooth…

12.37 Quite neat: when you send a pic via Bluetooth, you can drop the quality setting down to QVGA and XGA or – thankfully – send it as a full res 6MP image. It’s just worked very merrily with our laptop and our Nokia 3250.

12.39 Pricing and availability: £350 this June.

12.40 Right, we’re off back to HQ to give the cam a proper test. Expect to read more about it online and in the mag soon.

Official specs:

6MP

10x optical zoom

2.8in LCD

Bluetooth

Wide angle lens