I like my Flip Video HD

With nearly 1 million Flips sold since the digital camcorder's May, 2007, debut, and with enthusiastic fans like Oprah and Rosie O'Donnell, Kaplan and his design team seemed to have struck a chord with consumers.

The beauty of the Flip Video is that it is simple to use, no cables or batteries to worry about, the Flip receives it recharge by plugging into the USB slot of your laptop or computer (and believe it or not, it is not made by Apple!).

The design philosophy of the Flip Video is to strip away all control buttons and features from a typical camcorder and add back only the essentials. Kaplan and his team began by eliminating the slot found on many digital cameras for extra memory cards needed to store lots of images. Instead, the Flip offers internal storage from a half hour to an hour, depending on the model. They replaced multiple controls with a simple series of buttons.

The hardest part was replacing the unwieldy USB cables and chargers that come with most digital camcorders. First the team tried retracting power cables. But that didn't eliminate cords, which can tangle or get lost. Instead, they chose cheap AA batteries to power the Flip?so there's no need for a clunky plug or AC adapter.

Pure Digital's solution to the messy cables often needed to attach a camcorder to a PC to upload files is a design breakthrough: the flip-out USB key. And it became the Flip's brand symbol. Kaplan's inspiration came not from Silicon Valley but from Detroit, from the key to his Audi.