Eye-Fi Mobi Review

Introduction

Wi-Fi is increasingly being incorporated into many mid to top end digital cameras, a useful feature that allows instant access and sharing through several portals. However, it’s a still widely regarded as a premium thing, which means getting those photos from the camera to our devices is still a laborious process. In minimizing the agony of having to do all of that, the Eye-Fi Mobi is coming to the rescue by delivering Wi-Fi connectivity to any SD card accepting digital camera – essentially giving us instant access to our multimedia content from our mobile devices.

The package contains

• Travel case

Design

It’s an SD card, but doused in a hard-to-miss bright orange paint job.

Most of you are probably familiar with the Eye-Fi, seeing that the company has been selling several models for a while now. One of its latest is the Eye-Fi Mobil, a Wi-Fi enabled Secure Digital card that wirelessly transfers images from your digital camera to your mobile device. Therefore, it won’t shock people to know that it looks like any ordinary SD card – albeit, it’s doused in a bright orange paint job.

Besides that, there’s nothing too out of the box with this one. However, it’s especially important to remind ourselves that it’s packing along a Wi-Fi radio, which is impressive considering that it’s all stuffed inside of an SD card.

Eye-Fi App

Currently, the Eye-Fi Mobi supports mobile devices running iOS 5.1+ or Android 2.3+. Sorry BlackBerry and Windows Phone, you’re out of luck when it comes to this. Naturally, the app is available as a free download through the App Store for iOS devices and the Google Play Store with Android.

Checking out the app, it’s pretty simple and basic, since it mostly aggregates content taken from the Eye-Fi Mobi card. Some will appreciate the automatic download feature, but it would’ve been nice to be given the choice of what content should be downloaded from the card – more so when larger video files take longer to transmit.

Once they’re downloaded, not only are we able to view them (both photos and videos) on our device, but we also have the option to share them via email, Facebook, or Twitter. Beyond that, there’s nothing else that the app offers in terms of additional features.

Performance

The Eye-Fi Mobi takes the hassle out of getting access to our photos and videos. Point, shoot, and it’ll automatically upload it to your mobile device.

Setting up the Eye-Fi Mobi is a simple procedure that requires us to connect via Wi-Fi to the network established by the card. After inputting the activation code, the card is ready to work with our mobile device. Fortunately, even though it’s transferring content via Wi-Fi, our smartphone/tablet can still surf the web thanks to cellular connectivity. Now, it would’ve been nice if there were a way to connect the Eye-Fi card to an existing home network.

The connection is pretty quick when it comes to downloading content from the Eye-Fi Mobi to our mobile device. As soon as the content is recorded, they’re automatically sent to our mobile device – and it doesn’t take too long. Photos captured in JPG and PNG formats are supported, but when it comes to videos, it plays nicely with ones in AVI, MOV, MP4, MPG, and MTS format. Using a Panasonic Lumia FZ40 digital camera, it takes approximately 6 seconds to transfer a 14-megapixel image to an iPhone 5s. Obviously, videos will take a longer period of time to transfer.

Internally, there’s an arsenal of tech that blend together in bringing to life the Eye-Fi Mobi. In fact, it features a powerful ARM CPU to guarantee that file transfers are reliable, an 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi radio, and a state of the art class 10 memory from Samsung. Honestly, you wouldn’t know that so much is inside this tiny thing, just because the whole entire process is intuitive. It just works!

Conclusion

No one likes having to work hard in order to get photos and videos from their digital cameras to their mobile devices. Fortunately for all of us, the Eye-Fi Mobi takes the hassle by granting any camera with Wi-Fi functionality – so that content can be wirelessly transferred. Frankly, there’s nothing to the entire process, seeing that it’s simple, intuitive, and downright fast. And best of all, there is no hassle with it.

For those of you wondering, the Eye-Fi Mobi is available in different capacities – 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB. Pricing for the three is set for $49.99, $79.99, and $99.99 respectively. Photogs surely know that those are pricey things when taking into consideration the storage options, but for those who desperately want a better and faster way of downloading and sharing content, this is one of the few options available for you. Hell, it’s better than having to do it the old fashion way.