Eye-Fi

I don’t actually own this. Yet.

That being said, this thing looks fascinating. An illustration of the future that you can buy today. And a pretty impressive feat of technology too.

Eye-Fi is an SD card with a catch. Squeezed in somehow is an 802.11b transmitter which will wirelessly upload your photos to Flickr and other photo sharing sites. Auto-magically.

Yes.

It works like any other SD card. But whenever you get in range of your preconfigured network router, the card will access your computer, wirelessly download the photos to your PC and then upload them to your specified site. Quite the impressive feat, and while I hear it does it very well, I’ve never personally seen or experienced it, and I’m sure there are probably quirks. One thing I do know is that (as of now) it wont erase the photos off the card after they’ve been transferred to the PC, but that’s just a software tweak (hackers anyone). At that point I’d call this thing revolutionary since it would basically become an “unlimited memory card.”


Geeky Applications:

• Even more convenient avenue for attention whore photo sharing!
• You can take photos at an event and have them project on a wall for instant sharing.

Pros:

• When in range of an approved network, will being wireless transfer
• Also functions as a normal SD card when out of range
• Potential

Cons:

• Only SD, only transmits JPGs, and only works in cameras. However you can put it into an SD to compact flash converter resulting in reduced range
• Uses cameras battery an unquantified “slight” amount
• Only works on a preconfigured laptop+router, does not work ad hoc or on open networks
• At the moment $100 for a 2gb… which equals 15gb of normal SD cards

Decent Competitive Alternative:

• None that I'm aware of