Content area
Full Text
GEAR & TECHNIQUES: PRODUCT REVIEWS
EYEFI MOBI PRO
Memory for the mobile era. by GreG Scoblete
Digital cameras have their megapixel war, but a more intriguing-and arguably more significant-contest is underway in the photo industry. The battle over who gets to manage and secure your photo library is now expanding from desktop hard drives and external drives to encompass mobile devices and the cloud.
In this showdown, it's not companies like Canon and Nikon duking it out but firms like Adobe, Google, Dropbox and Eyefi. The latter is unique in that it doesn't simply have mobile apps and a cloud service to bring to the table, but a WiFi-enabled memory card too. That brings the Eyefi solution closest to the point-of-capture, whether you're capturing with a DSLR or smartphone.
Is this proximity a decisive advantage? We went hands-on with Eyefi's latest offering, the Mobi Pro card, to find out.
Cutting thE Cord
The Mobi Pro is a 32GB, Class 10 SDHC card. It has a built-in Wi-Fi radio with two modes, direct and infrastructure, for connecting to mobile devices, Wi-Fi networks and the Eyefi Cloud.
In direct mode, the card creates a connection between itself and a mobile device running the Eyefi app to transfer RAW and JPEG images to the device and then up to the cloud. Once your mobile device is configured to access the Mobi Pro card (a process that takes about a minute), direct transfers happen automatically and scoop up all of your images. If you don't want to transfer images en-masse, you can set the Mobi Pro to selectively transfer only the images you want. Then, during playback on your camera, only images that you protect (or lock) will be transferred.
JPEG and RAW images don't simply transfer from card to mobile device, they also piggyback on your phone's cellular connection to upload to the Eyefi Cloud. In fact, mobile devices are more of a way station for your full resolution files. Once they've been uploaded to the Eyefi Cloud, the original files are deleted on your phone and replaced with smaller JPEG previews to save space. The Eyefi app allots itself 4GB of storage on your device and intelligently manages the size of these previews as your library grows....