This is the only mini HD video camera on the market at present with a rotating head and that's the reason I use it. If you don't need the rotating head, there are better mini cams on the market and I recommend you seek them out.
I knocked off a star because during continuous recording, you have to re-press the record button every 25 minutes - that's the max clip length. Non of the other so called drawbacks concerned me: no on-board battery charging, slightly soft 1080i, the fact that you need to buy a memory card, lousy low light recording, etc etc etc. It is what it is folks - a fairly inexpensive high definition recorder.
For all you hobbyists out there, I've been using this for about a month now and I've got to say, for the price it's a keeper. I've attached it to an rc helicopter and sent it up a couple of hundred feet, strapped it to the handlebars of a bike and velrco'd it to the bill of my baseball hat. In each of these situations, the rotating head allows the lense to be pointed correctly regardless of mounting constraints.
The camera has no image stabilization (not unusual for a mini) so I shoot in "sports" mode which gives a little faster shutter speed (no good for indoors, though) and then run it through the anti-shake filter (set on low) in Cyberlink Power Director 7. I shoot in 720P mode and the quality is somewhere between dvd and blue ray when played back on a decent set.
Hope that helps you make up your mind!