4W Review: Eye-Fi Mobi 8GB

What is it?

The Eye-Fi Mobi is an SD card with built-in WiFi that allows photographers to send pictures and videos directly to their iPhones , iPads and Android devices allowing them to be shared instantly via your favorite social media platforms.

What does it do?

The Eye-Fi Mobi is a Class 10 SDHC card that sends photos (.jpeg) and videos (.mpg, .mov, .flv, .wmv, .avi, .mp4, .mts, .m4v, .3gp under 2GB per file) to iOS and Android devices. Once the Eye-Fi Mobi is paired with your device, it creates an encrypted network with WPA2 security that is password protected. Passwords are unique to each Mobi card allowing transfers to be secure.

What’s wrong with it?

The Mobi can only send photos and videos to your smartphone or tablet and cannot send media to your PC or MAC. If you desire the capability of sending media to your PC or MAC, then you will need to pick up the Eye-Fi Pro X2 .

Eye-Fi Mobi will only work with iOS and Android devices including the Kindle Fire. Windows Mobile users are out of luck for the time being.

If there is large concentration on networks, the transfer speed does take a bit of a hit. We saw this when we were shooting the PhotoPlus Expo a few weeks back – but once it got going the transfers were quick and painless.

Why do you/don’t you need it?

I recommend the Eye-Fi to photographers who want to share higher quality pictures via social media and to photographers who want to show off their images in a hurry. A great example for use of this is having an iPad or Android tablet set up in family room while you take holiday photos so family members can see them instantly. I used this feature during my wedding by setting up my Nexus 7 tablet and Note 3 with the Mobi app so that our guests could see the photos that were being taken instantly.

My Take:

I have been an Eye-Fi user for quite some time and loved the fact that I did not need to connect my camera to a PC to see my photos. Now that we are covering more events for the site, I really appreciate the abilities the Mobi has to offer since we can now share high quality images not only on Facebook and Instagram but also send images to Dropbox as well. The Dropbox workaround remedies the lack of PC connectivity. I definitely recommend the Eye-Fi especially with the holidays around the corner. You’ll ask yourself why you didn’t buy one sooner.