Tuesday, May 20, 2008

New Eye-Fi Products

I was offline last week, attending a few family members' college graduations. While I was gone, Eye-Fi announced a few new products. Just wild conjecture, but I bet that the only difference in the cards is the firmware. I doubt we are seeing a hardware rev at all. In any case, looks like Eye-Fi has some good marketing folks! I love to see companies that put out solid incremental products like this.

The Eye-Fi Explore can also now log on to certain WiFi hotspots but apparently no T-Mobile or AT&T ones like at Starbucks. This is great progress and I hope to see these capabilities widening in the future, but this is definitely a baby step. More wild conjecture, but I bet that Wayport either already has or was able to implement a simplified log-on which the Eye-Fi card could perform. Remember, the card has very little RAM and a pretty tiny program storage area. It has no real web browser and can't do the SSL that most web sites use to secure authentication information.

The "Explore" can also evidently geotag your photos if the WiFi access point you are using has been mapped. According to this page, the tagging is done in the "Eye-Fi Service", which I assume means it happens after the upload from the card. I bet there's an extra bit of data sent along with the access point's MAC address during the upload now. I'd love to get some dumps of these uploads happening if anyone has one!

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