flash-dock
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Mount your iPhone in your DSLRs hot shoe dock
DSLR shooters -- have you ever wanted to mount your iPhone on top of your camera? No? Well, this product might give you a reason to do exactly that. The Flash-Dock (US$39.95) is designed to slide into the hot shoe on top of your expensive camera and provide a way to hold your iPhone while you're snapping away. Why would you want to have your iPhone sitting there while you're shooting? According to the marketing materials from Flash-Dock, you'll want to have it there for geotagging of your photo shoots and sharing your photos immediately with the world. And if you happen to own a Canon 5D Mark II DSLR, you can use your iPhone's flash as a low-light autofocus aid. Well, there's one problem. After you spend $40 for this device, you need to also buy a Eye-Fi card to send those huge, high-resolution photos from your camera to the iPhone over an ad hoc Wi-Fi connection. Then you can use your 3G/4G iPhone connection to send them to the world where they'll chew up your monthly data allotment faster than a shark goes through a surfer. The Flash-Dock folks also fail to say exactly how you get your DSLR camera to nab the .GPX location information from the iPhone when it takes a picture, so I'm guessing that there's a manual step involved here. Frankly, you could do the same thing with an iPhone in your pocket or camera bag and an Eye-Fi card in your DSLR, and you'd avoid the weight of the phone throwing off the balance of your camera and the $40 charge for the Flash-Dock. Of course, you wouldn't be able to use the iPhone as an expensive low-light autofocus assistant, but there are other ways to do that. Like some of the other dubious products we see from time to time here at TUAW, the Flash-Dock appears to be a solution in search of a problem.
