In use

In use the Eye-Fi card is fairly idiot proof, you simply start taking pictures and they're transmitted back to your computer (and your web gallery if you picked one). If you're out of range of an associated access point (if you're outside for instance) the card will begin transmitting whatever hasn't yet been uploaded as soon as it's back in range (and the camera is switched on). During transmission the Eye-Fi Manager tray icon begins animating and a small pop-up window appears with a thumbnail of the image being transmitted as well as progress bar (three examples here, although they only appear one at a time). Note that if transmission is interrupted (the camera powers off or goes out of range) it will continue where it left off once reconnected.

You can also double-click on the Eye-Fi Manager icon to sign into the manager application for a history of recent uploads from the card (both to Web and the Computer).

Caveat: We did initially have problems with the Eye-Fi card, it certainly doesn't have the range of any WiFi device with an aerial (such as a laptop or PDA) so you really need to find its working range before you start using it in anger.

Performance

The table below shows a quick comparison of transmission times for single images using three different cameras. Transmission began between three and five seconds after taking the image and as you can see on average achieved around 200 KB/sec (1.6 MBit/sec), we did manage to max out at 300 KB/sec by placing the camera on top of the access point.

Next we tested uploading a batch of images, to do this we simply turned off our access point, took half a dozen shots, turned the camera off, turned the access point back on and then the camera. We began timing as soon as the Eye-Fi card began uploading (as indicated by the animating tray icon) and ended timing once all images had been transmitted. To our surprise batch uploading was slower than single images, this appears to be due to a short pause (around a second) between each image uploaded.

Conclusion

Issues / concerns

• Only works with associated access points which have no additional 'login' layer (ie. only home / office access points, not public access points) and this can only be carried out with the Eye-Fi Manager software running on a computer
• Requires a good WiFi signal to work properly, has less range than typical WiFi devices
• Uploads each and every image taken, no ability to select which images are uploaded
• Uploads full size images to web galleries (it would have made more sense for the Eye-Fi Manager to provide the option to resize incoming
• For single images, demos and entertaining transmission times are acceptable, however if you came home with a card full of images (2 GB) it would take three hours to download all images (if the camera battery could last that long)
• Requires that the camera does not power off otherwise obviously transmission is interrupted
• Unknown additional impact on camera battery life
• Performance is made to look pretty poor in comparison to most cheap USB 2.0 card readers which can manage ~10 MB/sec (some fifty times faster than the Eye-Fi card)
• No Compact Flash version (yet)

The Eye-Fi card is one of those products which is great fun out of the box but the returns begin to diminish the more you use it. It's not particularly fast (no surprise really as it is WiFi but it's quite a bit slower than we expected), it needs to be pre-configured for each access point and doesn't support public access points, it uploads everything on the card (which could literally be a gigabyte of images) and there's no option for delivering reduced size images to photo sharing sites (although to counter that you can uploaded without a computer which could be useful if your files aren't too large).

Once configured and in a 'home' environment it is arguably easier getting images from your camera back to your computer, but you really wouldn't want to use it as a mass transfer alternative to a card reader. If you really want a card reader and wire free solution to getting your images onto your computer then you could just get a SanDisk Ultra II USB SD card which has a built-in USB connector, for $50. Lastly it's probably worth pondering the point of this product, do people really have problems plugging their cameras into a USB cable / placing the card in a card reader / placing the camera on a dock?