Be Smart

The Grand Poobah of Sony, Sir Howard Stringer, introduced this product himself, the much-rumored but never seen before, DSC-G3 Cyber-shot Digital Camera, the world's first Wi-Fi camera with a built-in browser.The "Easy Upload Home Page" allows you to directly upload your pictures and videos on popular sharing sites via any public Wi-Fi hotspot.(It has free access to any AT&T hotspot until 2012, says the Sony press release.)



The Cyber-shot DSC-G3 model is also a “photo album in your pocket”, enthused Mr. Sony, with an 4GB of internal memory that can store approx 1,000 full-resolution or 40,000 VGA-quality photos. Nice. Comes with a 3.5-inch wide touch panel LCD screen Xtra Fine LCD screen, bigger than most cameras, and the already standard features: "Intelligent Scene Recognition" (automatically picks the best automatic scene setting), "Face Detection", "Smile Shutter" (it snaps when people smile) and "Dynamic Range Optimizer", which automatically balances contrast and detail.

Do we want one? Of course, but not until this Cyber-camera gets a work out in the real world. For instance,how accessible are the free Wi-Fi spots? How reliably does it upload to say, YouTube? Before we plunk down $500, we want to test this baby. Leave that to us. Oh, yeah, and here's a photo of the Sony Booth at CES, the next thing to being there.