Matsushita's new D-snaps

Matsushita Electric Industrial (Panasonic to you) has announced a couple of successors to its D-snap SV-AS10, a slim, low-budget still and video camera/music player/voice recorder. The SV-AS30 (pictured above) loses a little weight and gains some battery life, but looks more or less like its predecessor; the SV-AS3 goes for a boxier look and longer-lasting battery (36 hours of audio playback), and loses the AS30's speaker. Otherwise, specs are similar—cameras get a bump up to 3.2 megapixels from the AS10's 2.0, the video format changes to MPEG-4 from Motion JPEG, and the maximum frame rate jumps to 30fps from 15fps. The SV-AS30 should be out end-October for about Y34,000 ($310), with the AS3 following at the end of November for Y28,000 ($255).