Oh! Gizmo

By Evan Ackerman

When I reviewed the Eye-Fi wireless SD card back in May, one of the quibbles I had with it was that there was no way to decide which pictures you wanted to upload. The card would send ‘em all… Good ones, bad ones, naked ones, everything you take just goes. In fact, here’s what I said: “there isn’t any way to designate specific pictures to upload, or not to upload. But of course, there isn’t really a way to integrate that sort of functionality into the card itself.” Yep, I said that. Happily, I’m here to report that I’m an idiot and Eye-Fi is a genius, because they’ve made it happen: you can now selectively upload pictures from your camera.

It’s quite simple, really: using the online manager, you can set up the card to only upload pictures (or videos) that you’ve designated on your camera as locked. That’s it. The rest of the pictures will stay on your card for you to do whatever you like with. On my Nikon D40x, the lock button is right next to my thumb. It’s easy, it works, and as of today it’s available for free for all Eye-Fi cards.

Also released today is a new, uh, level? of Eye-Fi card, the Eye-Fi Pro. It costs $150, and is able to handle RAW files, as well as connect to a computer via an ad-hoc wireless network, i.e. no router necessary. These are certainly nice features, although RAW support at least seems more like a firmware upgrade, and it would be cool if Eye-Fi would push that option out to their other cards, even if it’s for a small fee, so that people who want to be able to upload RAW don’t have to buy a whole new card. I guess I shouldn’t really complain, though, since we’re getting the selective upload update for free.

[ Eye-Fi ]

As we’ve mentioned to you before, the Eye-Fi card is really a pretty brilliant idea. Digital cameras are neat little gadgets, but getting all your awesome pics from your camera to the computer and to the internet is still a stone age process that involves plugging cables into things and taking cards out of things and running software and pushing buttons and waiting around. It’s utterly ridiculous. Eye-Fi has the solution to this, with an SD card that includes a WiFi antenna that automatically sends pictures and video that you take directly to the internet and your computer, no cables necessary.

We’ve got a full review of the Eye-Fi Explore Video for you, right after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

By Andrew Liszewski

With a breakthrough that’s sure to have far-reaching ramifications, Thanko’s latest USB card reading pen includes not one, not two, not three, but four SD card slots! Now I find it kind of odd that I didn’t see this headlined on CNN last night, since it’s been theorized that pen-sized card readers could be built to maybe handle two cards, three at best if certain laws of physics were re-written. But four? Almost unthinkable. Until now that is. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, what a time to be alive…

Brando, the ball’s in your court. I know you’ve got the know-how to make a five SD card slot pen, but have you got the guts?

[ Akihabara News - Thanko's Latest Four SD Slot Pen ]

By Evan Ackerman

From the Brando’s ‘obviously great idea’ department (which they seem to be paying attention to more and more lately) comes this brilliant (albeit slightly flowery) USB cable with an integrated SD/SDHC card reader. It works just like a normal USB cable, except that plugging an SD card into the slot will terminate the USB connection and your computer will start reading the SD card. Whatever you have plugged into the cable will continue charging, though.

At the moment, the SD reader only only works one way on the cable, but it would be pretty neat if you somehow had the option to read the card from the device you had plugged in, or vice versa. Even so, it’s a steal at $12, considering you could easily pay that much for a USB cable or a card reader.

[ Brando ] VIA [ CrunchGear ]

By Jonathan Kimak

For those lucky enough to have a Wii here is some good news; It will soon be possible to load WiiWare games directly from an SD card. For those of you who don’t know, currently the downloaded games have to be stored on the small 512MB internal memory of the Wii. Since that doesn’t allow for many games, people have been switching games off the internal storage and onto an SD card in order to load a new game and then switching the game back if they ever want to play it again. The constant switching can be very tedious. With the proposed update all that frustration will be gone and the Wii will have yet another reason to continue its dominance in the console wars.

The Wii will only accept SD cards that are 2GB or smaller so be sure to stock up on a few.

This is still far from happening however, as this feature will not be available until the spring.

VIA [ Engadget ]