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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.

Unboxing shots of just-arrived MacBook Air

Ever since seeing the MacBook Air in the flesh (so to speak) at Macworld Expo, I've been very excited about getting a loaner for review.

It's finally here! I snapped a few unboxing photos.

Alert: This movie could cause motion illness

I popped into the cineplex restroom last night while my pal Chris and I were waiting for Cloverfield to begin. When I reemerged, Chris said, "We're in a different theater, someone threw up due to motion sickness, so they're cleaning up."

He was kidding (about the vomiting, anyway, not the theater switching), but I bet this has happened in other places.

I snapped the above while buying my ticket last night.

P.S. Cloverfield is terrific, but you may never look at the downtown-St. Paul skyline quite the same way ever again.

Twitter is dangerously close to being broken

The more addicted I get to the Twitter microblogging service, the more incensed I become with its incessant outages, momentary hiccups and other assorted glitches -- like its bad habit of eating my just-created tweets, forcing me to re-compose.

Argh!

A few more (iPhone) photos from Macworld

Silly me: I snapped a few Macworld pictures using my iPhone's built-in still camera, but neglected to post those photos.

Here they are. (UPDATE: All my Macworld pics are in one place now.)

These are shots of a San Francisco cable car; the media hordes just prior to the Stevenote; a view of the show floor; and a pulse-pounding picture of my luggage at the San Francisco airport as I returned to Minnesota.

In the last shot, the box atop the suitcase contains an Elgato device for TV recording on a Mac. I will be testing that gizmo with Elgato's just-upgraded EyeTV software.

Macworld vid now twincities.com-embedded

 

Here's the Pioneer Press-embedded version of the video I shot at Macworld Expo.

The quality is a bit better than in the YouTube version.

Macworld recap: The Apple-y week that was

Today's Tech Test Drive column focuses on my experiences at last week's big Macworld Expo. Here's a related photo gallery.

This column (also appearing here) caps more than a week of Macworld coverage. I filed three meaty articles out of the Expo, along with a bunch of tech-blog posts (see 'em all here), dozens of photos (see album link on upper right of this page), some video (here and here) and a flurry of Twitter tweets.

A bit of attention was focused on yours truly during Macworld, too. I was in a cartoon, two podcasts and a local blog post.

Fun week! Hope to do it again next year.

Macworld Expo: Photos and videos from trip

I covered plenty of ground at Macworld Expo, snapped lots of pictures for the blog (see the album links on the upper right) and also shot a bit of video. See some of that below.

Above is one of my fave pics from the trip, taken just before I plunged below street level to take the BART train that is party of San Francisco's public-transportation system.

It's of the Apple retail store and the nearby, busy intersection not far from my hotel. Here's the store page and corresponding Google Street View.

HD Radio adds iTunes tagging to goose sales

With terrestial radio quietly going digital, makers of HD Radio sets are trying to goose still-anemic sales.

Their latest ploy is iTunes tagging. This lets users push a button to bookmark a song they like, transfer the data to an iPod, and then add this info to iTunes during the next sync session so the tune can be purchased on the iTunes Store.

I have all the details in today's Pioneer Press.

I saw the above JBL model at Macworld, and took several crappy pictures of it (here, here and here). It was not, I was disappointed to find, a working model even though iTunes tagging is already operational in the San Francisco Bay Area and at other selected radio stations around the country.

HD Radio has been playing catch-up with satellite radio in key respects. While handheld receivers for satellite radio are commonplace, mobile HD Radio gear was viewable only in prototype form at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week (with nothing of the sort on display at Macworld). It’s unclear when finished devices would go on sale.

Macworld is over (for me). What lies ahead.

Macworld Expo has ended today, at least for me -- it runs for one more day -- and I'm headed back to St. Paul tomorrow morning (after a quick bite at the 24-hour Denny's around the corner from my hotel).

But I'm not done with Macworld just yet.

My Tech Test Drive column for Monday tackles stuff I can actually tech-test-drive on my own: the updated iPhone and Apple Touch, along with iTunes Store movie rentals.

I'll also throw in some impressions of my time with MacBook Air samples on display at the show, though I'll save most of my thunder for a formal review once a M.A. lands on my desk. (Ditto for the Apple TV update; An Apple TV in my office awaits the software upgrade.)

I shot a bunch of videos at the show, so I'll assemble the best ones into a fun sequence -- a certain Best Buy sound-mixing dude is not to be missed -- that will give you a flavor for the Macworld atmosphere. Look for that at TwinCities.com to coincide with my Monday column.

I shot lots of pictures, too, and uploaded them indiscriminately (see the album links on this blog's upper right), so I will pick out best of them and pretty them up for a single, permanent Macworld Expo album.

There likely will be assorted blog posts and Twitter tweets before my MacBook fever abates next week. For those who aren't into Macs, thanks for bearing with me.