Helmet cameras have now achieved the pinnacle of HD recording: 1080p. If you have the cash, a head, and a pastime worth filming you have a few choices for full HD extreme POV recording. So what's a little lid-mounted recorder to do for its next trick? If you're Contour it's to add a positional sensor and the letters G, P, and S to your product and create the ContourGPS. It lets you not only record your extreme antics but also how fast you were going when you were partaking in them, plus a lot of other information. And, more promisingly, there's a suite of hardware updates here, some paving the way to letting you use your smartphone as a viewfinder. But how does this $350 piece of helmet jewelry perform on the ice? Keep on reading for some video evidence.

The biggest update here is the included GPS receiver, naturally. Using it the camera adds positional information to the footage that it captures (at your choice of resolutions up to 1080p), which lets you later view the path covered and speed achieved while recording. Also new is a Bluetooth module, a nugget of silicon that's not doing anything right now but, in the near future, will enable mobile devices to receive video in real-time and to modify camera settings, a feature Contour calls Live Viewfinder.

Beyond that Contour has a habit of subtly tweaking and improving its camera designs with each revision, with the ContourHD 1080p model getting a more progressive slider compared to its 720p predecessor, along with a few other subtle tweaks. The new ContourGPS still shares the same look as those two that came before, but it offers still more modifications. The slider up top, which is used to start and stop recording, is now raised with little rubber nubbies sticking out. This makes it even easier to start and stop this camera without having to take off your super-comfy, fleece-lined mittens.

Around back the door that covers the battery case is now hard plastic and spring-loaded, much more secure than the previous one that always felt a bit flimsy. To keep it from flipping open at the wrong time a little lock has been added, but the push power button on the back remains unchanged. It's still awful hard to find with gloves on and sometimes hard to activate even bare handed.

Flip the door open and the layout inside is much the same, with a miniUSB port on the left (still no micro), battery on the right, and a microSD slot in the middle. The battery is now held in place by a spring-loaded clasp instead of the finicky rotating lock that always gave us problems before, and there's a tiny switch that lets you toggle between one of two modes. Which two modes? We're glad you asked.

Updated software

We've never exactly been a fan of the software suite that's been provided with Contour's cameras, so we weren't too disappointed to see a wholly new software suite introduced here. It's called Storyteller unfortunately it's basically the same as before. Through this app you can download footage from your camera, view it, and upload it to Contour's site. You can also do simple editing -- as long as you only want to trim the front and the back off of the video. You can't do anything more advanced and, while you're free to do what you will using an external video tool (footage is encoded in a .mov container), if you do so you'll lose the GPS data. So much for that idea.

The software also lets you configure the camera, creating two configurations with different resolutions, exposure and sound settings, and also selecting whether GPS is enabled. Many of these tweaks will mess with your battery life, which the app will warn you about -- though it stops short of giving you any estimated figures.

Upload a video from the app and it'll show up on the Contour website, which attempts to offer a bit more social interaction than your YouTubes and the like. More important is that it has room for a map over on the right, providing a real-time Google Maps overlay of where the wearer was during this frame of footage and how fast they were going. At least, it will do that assuming the camera scored a GPS lock before the footage started recording.