new Eye-Fi X2 connects to your smart phone

[haven]

Eye-Fi is an SD card that can send photos from your camera to your computer as you make exposures. As the name suggests, this product works using WiFi. It's been available for a year or more.

But what if you don't want to lug your computer around as you're shooting? A new Eye-Fi app is under development. The app runs on a smart phone, and works wirelessly with Eye-Fi in your camera. The transferred photos can be saved on your phone. Or the app can forward the photos via the phone's 3G connection to an online photo service (e.g., Flickr) or a social networking site (e.g., Facebook).

The new app was demonstrated at CES. Eye-Fi says it will be available later in 2011. No word on which platforms will be supported, but I'm betting on iPhone and Android first.

 

[DrMoab]

but I'm betting on iPhone and Android first.

Great, I can put a bunch of photos on my iPhone with no possible way to file them.

Of course that is only if Apple doesn't pull a typical retard move and ban them from making an app.

 

[haven]

You can dump them from the iPhone to iTunes in the usual way, or use a third party program on your Mac to copy the files from phone to computer. It's a flat file, organized in chronological order.

I'm not sure, but I think that the new iPhone iOS 4 allows you to organize photos into multiple folders.

 

[4xdog]

I've had one of the original-style Eye-Fi Share SD cards for more than a year, and I like it. Useful for backing up photos. The software really doesn't give me some of the organizing options I want -- or at least I haven't figured out how to do what I want.

For example, my photos transfer automatically to folders named using MM-DD-YYYY as the folder name. Makes it real easy to find any photo taken in a certain month, regardless of year. Who wants to do that? Who thinks it's logical for month 11 to follow month 1? Who thinks all month 4 photos ought to be grouped sequentially irrespective of year? Once you start using it for some time it gets awkward to organize, or time consuming to work around.

So, the Eye-Fi isn't a great aid to organization. Couple that with the difficulty in organizing photos on iPhone or iPad, and it's a product I don't need. Once I figure out how to organize more automatically, I'd still stay with the camera-to-PC option.

My $0.02.

 

[cshontz]

Walk-around cameras desperately need "wifi publish to Flickr / Facebook / Twitter" features. For this reason, my iPhone has become my primary point-and-shoot, despite its output being inferior to most other point-and-shoots. If my dedicated camera had this sort of connectivity, it'd get a ton more use.

And I'm speaking in regard to very casual photography. I have no desire for such a feature on my DSLR, where everything runs through the computer first and gets post-processed to some extent.

Anyway, if the new Eye-Fi X2 fills this gap, then... yay! I'd much rather see connectivity built into camera bodies, though.