Back in my pro/amateur photographer days I shot a wedding or two (only for my cheap relatives) and I carried a Quantum external battery pack for all the flash photos that a wedding requires. So for someone that is going to be using flash a bunch, you can never have enough powAr.

Anyway, since taking snowboard shots was mentioned, you definitely need to look at long lenses, high shutter speeds, and yes, burst mode. Sports are pretty easy to shoot with the right equipment, but the right equipment is really expensive. It also tends to be rather bulky. Taking a video and then pulling frames out of it most definitely ain't gonna cut it. For snowboard shots, you want to have a spot meter so you can meter for the person and not the vast whiteness which is surrounding them.

In my experience with snowboard photography, a 28-105 mm zoom works well if you're say at or near the bottom of a jump and catching people flying up above you. But to get less "whoa he's flying over me" angles or to take pictures of pipes and such you're usually farther away and thus need a longer lens. Another thing you want for snowboard shots is a polarizing filter to put on the front of the lens. Polarizing filters screw onto the front of lenses and basically make the sky look more blue than what's normally going into the camera. With a snowboard shot your non-sky elements are all white which doesn't provide a lot of contrast and therefor doesn't give you a blue sky.

To truly do all this stuff well, you'd pretty much need an SLR. A manual one and a deft touch would work, and automatic ones make sports photography ridiculously easy. But that'd be out of your price range especially when it comes to digital. So on to the choices of point-n-shoots.

The Canon A95 has an equivalent 38-114 mm lens. So you'd be stuck with standing at the base of a jump. It also, as far as I know, doesn't have any way to mount a filter on the front of the lens. It's a really nice camera overall but it would not be my first choice for snowboard shots.

That Kyocera M410R you mentioned actually would be a pretty good choice with its burst mode. Cnet says it's not as impressive as claimed but still better than most digital point-n-shoots. The big thing is its lens which has a nice range of equivalent 37-370 mm, and it also can take a polarizing filter on the front of the lens. The wide angle is perhaps a bit lacking if you're way up close under a smaller jump, but the tele end is really good for shots taken from farther away. It also has a (relatively) high top shutter speed of 1/2000 sec.

I don't know of any other cameras in your price range which provide the frame rate, long lens and filter capability. There are plenty of more expensive ones which do, but well, they're more expensive.