Eye-Fi has announced that they’re going to launch a new mobile feature, that instead of treating your phone simply like a Wi-Fi-equipped camera, as they’ve done with their iPhone app, now you can send your pictures to your phone tablet from your proper camera. Doing so will enable browsing, editing, and saving of the pictures from something a little nicer than your camera’s LCD screen. It’s unclear whether Direct Mode is doing this over Bluetooth, a shared Wi-Fi network, phones with mobile hotspot functions, or maybe something fancy like Wi-Fi Direct, or if it will be an app or something more automated that just fills your mobile media library with pictures. If it is an app and includes some editing features (especially for RAW), Direct Mode could be pretty awesome.
I just got an Eye-Fi card for Christmas, and it’s really awesome once it’s all set up. As you take pictures with the SD card installed on your point-and-shoot or DSLR camera, pictures are automatically shunted to your computer, and if you want, shared to a variety of online social networks. The biggest version is 8 GB, but with the flip of a switch, pictures can be cleared from the card as soon as they’re shared, allowing you to effectively take an infinite number of pictures. Pictures are also geo-tagged with Wi-Fi positioning, but I really hope that this new Direct Mode lets you plug into your phone’s GPS for more specific geolocation when on the move; Wi-Fi positioning doesn’t really work when your hotspot is mobile.
However they’re implementing it, Direct Mode will be enabled on existing Eye-Fi X2 cards later this year.
[via]