Eye-Fi just announced an update to its line of WiFi enabled SD cards and made them a whole lot more useful. The original $100 card has been rebadged "Eye-Fi Share" and has been joined by the "Eye-Fi Home", an $80 card which functions as a cable replacement: no uploading to Flickr or anywhere else, just wireless transfer to your computer, and the quite exciting $130 "Eye-Fi Explore", which will geotag and upload your photos out in the field. All models are till 2GB in size.
One of the problems our Danny Dumas noted with the original card is that it will only work with pre-configured WiFi access points. You needed to set the card up by connecting it to a computer. Now, the Explore will hook up to any of 10,000 Wayport hotspots in the US for upload. This is fine, and great for photographers who are set upon by over zealous security guards and told to delete their pictures ("Ha! They're already in the cloud"). The Explore will send photos to either the web or your home machine.
The real magic, though, comes with the new geotagging support. It doesn't use GPS, which would be too big a battery drain on the host camera. Instead it uses WiFi triangulation, just like the iPhone and iPod Touch. In fact, it uses the same Skyhook service that Apple uses. And if the card can't connect to a WiFi access point to grab the info it needs to geotag the photos, it will store a snapshot of the access points it sees and work things out later when you get back to your PC or Mac.
This is great news, and something we predicted last month:
Hopefully manufacturers will start bundling these cards with cameras. The price of the Explore includes a year of hotspot access.
Press release [Eye-Fi]
Product page [Eye-Fi]
