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Eye-Fi Mobi simplifies DSLR image sharing through your iOS device
I love my Canon DSLR for the flexibility of selecting high-quality lenses, a plethora of shooting modes, the faithful color renditions, and the high storage capacity I can get with inexpensive SD cards. But I find myself also shooting a lot of photos with my iPhone simply because I want to share those images with the world immediately. The Eye-Fi Mobi Wi-Fi memory card (starting at US$49.99 for an 8 GB capacity) offers a simple way to quickly "shoot and share" from a DSLR through your iOS device. I'm no stranger to Eye-Fi cards. I currently use the company's Connect X2 card when I'm shooting review photos for TUAW, since I can have them automatically transferred to my Mac without needing to remove the SD card and put it into the computer's SD card reader. You can find out if your DSLR or point-and-shoot is compatible with Eye-Fi's products through a compatibility program that's available through any of the Eye-Fi product pages. %Gallery-194924% My Canon DSLR, for example, integrates well with the Eye-Fi cards. It keeps the camera powered on until the Wi-Fi media uploads are done, displays a Wi-Fi icon on the camera's touchscreen that shows the status of uploads, and allows enabling/disabling of the card from the camera's menu. Setup of the Eye-Fi Mobi card for use with an iOS device is fast and easy. First, you install the free Eye-Fi app (universal, also available for Android and Kindle). The installation process requires that you enter the activation code that's on the back of the SD card case on the package; once that's done, the app installs a profile onto your iOS device. Next, the app asks for access to your Photo Library so that images sent from your DSLR can go right in without a need to be moved manually. Your next step is to pop the card into your camera and enable it. Once that's done and you take a picture with the camera, the card sets up a secure Wi-Fi network that's tied to the app you activated. Select that network in the Settings app, and you're ready to roll. Upon launching the app again, the photos are quickly uploaded to the iOS device. When I mean quickly, I mean that it takes only a few seconds for DSLR-quality images to be transferred at full resolution. I find this quite interesting, since the Eye-Fi to Mac connection on my home network is slower. In the future, I may use my iPhone as the intermediary for image transfers for reviews, since an Eye-Fi to iPhone to Mac (via Photo Stream sync) transfer is faster than what I've been seeing with a direct to Mac Wi-Fi connection. One more great thing is that you can share the DSLR images while Eye-Fi transfers are taking place, since enabling the ad-hoc Wi-Fi network still keeps your cellular data connection up and running. The Eye-Fi Mobi card comes in both 8 GB and 16 GB versions, and is available from many online retailers including Photojojo and Amazon as well as direct from Eye-Fi.
Eye-Fi's Mobi SD card sends images straight to a phone or tablet
When Eye-Fi first launched its wireless SD cards back in 2006, most of us weren't carrying smartphones, much less tablets. At the time, the idea was to send your photos straight from your camera to your PC, where you could run slideshows or upload them to the cloud (if you were already into that sort of thing). Lately, though, Eye-Fi has been forced to rethink its product: the company just announced the Mobi, a $50 Class 10 card that sends images directly to your mobile device, bypassing the computer altogether. Designed for people already used to storing pics on phones and tablets, it works with a free iOS / Android app that acts as an image viewer. To set it up, you enter a 10-digit activation code included in the packaging, which you can use with as many gadgets as you like. After that, the card will continuously send photos and video to your device. And because the Mobi is a hotspot unto itself, your gear doesn't all need to be on the same network, or even in range of a router. The Mobi is available today, priced at $50 for 8GB and $80 for 16GB. For those of you who expect to do some heavy-duty editing, you can still buy Eye-Fi's existing X2 cards, which send images to PCs, and can handle both RAW and JPEG. Additionally, those pro-level cards can be configured to send different file formats to different locations. If that seems like overkill, though, the Mobi might be the better option -- it's not like you can't eventually get those photos off your phone, right?
