Eye-Fi: Sleeper hit, geek sensation at shows

The sleeper hit of the recent Consumer Electronics Show and Macworld Expo was the Eye-Fi.

This is an flash-storage camera card with integrated wireless networking for transferring pictures to computers and uploading them to photo-serving services via high-speed Wi-Fi.

The card keeps getting better and better: The maker has just announced a bunch of new features and partnerships. An earlier deal with Lexar allows the flash-card maker to sell its own version of the Eye-Fi.

Supergeeks like Shawn King of Your Mac Life, Jacqui Cheng of Ars Technica and Nik Fletcher of The Unofficial Apple Weblog are wild about the card -- though they note drawbacks, such as a need to preconfigure networks instead of just using any available network.

(I'm nuts about the card, too, but just ran into my first major problem: I'm suddenly unable to add, delete or configure Wi-Fi-network info on the card after having reformatted, which shouldn't be an issue.)

Pasted below are e-mails I received from Jacqui and Nik, when I requested their Eye-Fi feedback:

Nik:

I can't quite decide what to think of the Eye-Fi. The eternal cynic makes me doubt there's a market for it. But I love it.

 

Setting up the card to connect to WiFi was super-easy, even if you have to do it via a Mac. It remembers more than one WiFi network, and doesn't mind being swapped between cameras. In one of my tests, I set it up at home with my D80 and snapped. Then, taking it to the office, I configured it there, snapped on the D80 and then borrowed the Canon Ixus from a colleague just to see if that would confuse it. Nothing. The photos kept on appearing on Flickr and also copying to my Mac (the software application showing a pop-up thumbnail as each appeared). With large images, the card is a little slow (3.5MB images took a little while) but that didn't really change my thoughts too much, as the card was consistent and reliable. Even with a large camera body such as my Nikon D80's around it, I could wander the house and still it would upload. 

A total gimmick? Perhaps. But a timesaver for the common-user? I'd say "Yeah, it is". To come back home in the evening with a dozen photos and for them to then be copied over wirelessly to my Mac by switching on the camera, just because I've got an Eye-Fi that can go "Hey, I know this network"? -- that just rocks.

Jacqui: 

Likes: We love how easy it is to set up on the Mac and how easy it is to use once you set it up. Once you set the Eye-Fi to use a specific network (using a computer), it can hop on that network anytime without the help of a computer. From there, it can upload directly to any of your favorite photo sharing services (we use Flickr). But if you don't want to put them online right away, you can have it connect wirelessly to your computer and transfer the photos as you're taking them if you want, or you can transfer them wirelessly later too. You can pretty much do whatever you're comfortable with, and the Eye-Fi is very flexible. You can set it to jump on multiple networks too, so if you have one at home, one at work, and one at a particular hotel that you frequent a lot, you can do that and it'll save all the settings. Having things uploaded directly to Flickr is absolutely our favorite. It's like magic. Take a photo in a high resolution (not a crappy cameraphone) and have it instantly appear online.

Dislikes: The Eye-Fi can't yet jump onto an open wireless network without the help of a computer. So if you're out & about and it sees an open network that's free to the public to use, it can't just automatically use it and upload your photos. You need to have it set up first to get on that network. We spoke with the Eye-Fi folks at Macworld and they said this is a highly-requested feature, and while they didn't promise anything, they indicated that they might be adding it in the future. 

Glitches: The Eye-Fi also cannot connect to an ad-hoc WiFi network created on a Mac OS X machine. We discussed it a little bit here. 

Basically, if you're using another Internet connection (Ethernet or whatever) and share your Mac's Internet over WiFi because you want the Eye-Fi to connect to it, it can't. This is apparently due to a bug in Mac OS X's bootp implementation and not due to the Eye-Fi itself, but it still sucks. 

Surprises: Other than the glitches & dislikes above, there were no surprises. Those two things were the biggest surprises, really. Otherwise, everything works exactly as expected. 

Bottom line on the product: We love it! We managed to indirectly sell another five Eye-Fis during Macworld alone because people kept seeing how we were using it and then rushing out to buy one. We take it everywhere to show people how it works, and people are just plain amazed. Sure, we'd love to be able to connect to an ad-hoc network, but we only do that maybe once or twice a year at most. The open WiFi networks thing would be cool too, and we hope it gets added soon. In the meantime, we'll continue using ours as we have been and continue telling people about it. It's absolutely worth the $99 it costs. And if you don't have an SD slot in your camera (for example, you might use CompactFlash instead), you can get an SD/CompactFlash adapter like we did and it'll work like a charm.

Comments

[Julio Ojeda-Zapata]

That's an excellent point, Chuck. The Eye-Fi is basically for pictures what your Qik/Mogulus integration was for automatically and seamlessly getting video out onto the Web.

[Chuck]

One of these would've been awesome on my recent roadtrip -- definitely gonna look into it!