© Red Pop

From the maker of MoviePeg™, comes the Red Pop; an iPhone 4 dock-connected grip han­dle that’ll turn your iPhone into a proper point-and-shoot by adding a phys­i­cal camera-shutter button.

The FAQ seems to have answered most of my ini­tial curios­ity; the good news is they are work­ing with ‘other app devel­op­ers’ to make it work with ‘your fave app’, besides the free Red Pop app, but the FAQ is yet to uncover the tech­ni­cal aspects of the prod­uct itself:

• Will the iPhone fall-off when we hold the grip ver­ti­cally upside-down?
• Does it work as a cap­ture but­ton only, or it also works as an AF/meter func­tion on half-press like most mod­ern camera?
• When the app crashes, do we have to man­u­ally open our fave cam­era app from the home­screen, or can we push the Red but­ton to auto­mat­i­cally launch it too?
• Will it rec­og­nize which app to use if we have more than one non-Red Pop apps?
• The grip comes with a wrist strap; can we carry the iPhone on our wrist with­out falling-off or am I ask­ing too much?
• Will the Red Pop works with the 3GS, and to-be-announced iPhone xx where it has a dif­fer­ent form fac­tor and build with the iPhone 4?

The only way I could jus­tify a $75 pur­chase of this thing is that if it answers most of the above ques­tions with a sim­ple yes; car­ry­ing an expen­sive add-on to my iPhone means an increased foot­print inside the pocket/bag/pouch (excess bag­gage), it also means I have to make sure I don’t loose it (extra care & atten­tion) and it has to work bet­ter — way bet­ter — than my cur­rent favorite always-available-camera setup: the iPhone 3GS + Hipstamatic.

With the lat­est Hipstamatic update, we can shoot con­tin­u­ous frames with­out hav­ing to wait for the ren­der­ing to fin­ish, and since it only cap­tures a square-formatted images — along with the clever back-camera style design — and the bril­liantly located yel­low cap­ture but­ton, I can com­fort­able snap pic­tures with just one hand and one thumb.

A prop­erly designed shut­ter but­ton would make the expe­ri­ence more pleas­ant, but to jus­tify the $75 and the ‘more’ fac­tor above, it needs to do more than just ‘a pleas­ing experience’.