Back in January, Eye-Fi, creators of a Wi-Fi-enabled SD memory card for cameras, announced that they would have a mobile product on the way. Yesterday, they went official with the Eye-Fi Mobile X2, an 8GB card which pairs up with Android, iPhone and iPad apps so you can share pictures from your DSLR or point-and-shoot camera right away. Traditionally, you needed a standard Wi-Fi hotspot in order to transfer pictures wirelessly to your desktop, but the Eye-Fi Mobile X2 uses something called Direct Mode, which will allow the card to communicate directly to your mobile devices whereever you are. This isn’t done using Wi-Fi Direct as you might assume, but rather the SD card creates its own Wi-Fi hotspot, to which your mobile device connects. As an Eye-Fi Pro X2 owner, I was happy to hear that Direct Mode would also become available as a software upgrade this week. I was a little less happy to hear that they were knocking the price down by fifty bucks.
Eye-Fi memory cards pair up with computers through a desktop app with a whole lot of functions, such as an endless shooting mode so pictures can be automatically deleted on the card once they’re safely transferred, cloud sharing to services like Picasa, Flickr, Facebook and YouTube, and picture geotagging (which I can only see getting better with mobile, since you’d presumably be using GPS instead of Wi-Fi positioning).
For photography enthusiasts in the field, the Eye-Fi Mobile X2 will be a pretty slick gadget to own. Preorders are available now for $79.99, with a launch proper on April 17, while the mobile apps will be free. Here are some videos to give you an idea of what’s going on. They mention briefly in one that you can edit your pictures, which gives me hope that there will be some basic cropping and colour correction stuff included in the app.
[via PRNewswire]