Phone cameras are great…as long as you’re in brightly lit places. Once the light starts to dim, the results get progressively worse, especially if you’re trying to shoot something like indoor video.

The LED flash lamps integrated into most phones are deliberately compromised by the need to eke out battery life, so the poor user is left with a choice of either lighting candles or waiting till sunrise to take his party night footage. But maybe this new pocket sized MagneFlash PHIL250 Phone Camera Lamp could help?

The product offers up 250 lumens of specially formulated light which is ‘highly diffused‘, and designed to provide an even color beam wide enough to support 16:9 format video. The range of the lamp is around 5 meters (15 feet) and because it’s been made by a photographic company rather than a generic manufacturer, it comes with the right kind of color balance (5600 degree K) to ensure more accurate color fidelity from your photos or videos.

The unit contains a USB rechargeable battery which should give several hours of use. It can be charged up in 2 hours (20 mins to 50%) and comes with a cutout to protect the battery from being over charged. The key thing with the unit is the fact that it is small enough to fit into a pocket, and comes with straps and a hook to make it easy to use with a phone or point and shoot.

The product is priced at £24.00 and comes with a full user’s manual, and we’re quite impressed with the light output. It’s the sort of device that could be very handy in the right circumstances but will probably stay on the shelf until needed. It’s compact, with an easy one button click operation, and in fact the only thing we’re not that impressed with is the dangling USB charging cable, which we feel could have been recessed underneath in a more elegant way.

But apart from that niggle, this is the kind of product which has been well thought out and comes with some valuable functionality for the price.