With my trench coat and dark glasses, I looked like a rumpled, portly version of Jason Bourne or James Bond as I stood by the Glienicke Bridge amoung Berlin and Potsdam, famed as the transfer point for captured spies amidst the East and the West during the Cold War.

As for the secret I carried, well, it was technological: Swann Communications Ltd.’s new PenCam DVR, a thick ball point pen that sports a tiny video camera and 2 gigabytes of memory. I felt well prepared to be a super spy instead of an anonymous reporter.

Sadly, fact trumps fantasy, and though the PenCam is plenty of fun, it has its limitations.

As spy craft goes, there’s been no dearth of tiny cameras. Agencies like the Soviet-era KGB, Britain’s MI6 and the East German Stasi were quite adept at hiding them in everything from belt buckles to coat buttons.

Swann’s nifty little device has the advantage of being available to anyone, for $120. And it takes about three hours of video — though be warned, it lacks the sharper quality you’re probably used to from higher-end cell phones or even webcams. It was clear sufficient for me to take footage of cityscapes and citizens and even to capture the text on some documents.

The pen’s camera is basic but functional, shooting in the AVI format, which can be played on Microsoft’s Media Player or Apple’s QuickTime as well as free applications available online. The camera turns on and off with the press of a small button on top, where the clicker on a normal pen would be. The camera can pick up images while it’s facing outward from your shirt pocket; a small light glows blue when the pen is recording and orange when it is paused.

The pen easily connects to a computer through the USB…

[Source] dhiram