Peek carefully at this picture of a Nikon D300 and you’ll see something unusual. No, it’s not the jaggy lines around the edges of the camera — that comes from the product page. Instead, it’s the little square box to the right of the lens, a tiny Bluetooth receiver which slips into the 10-pin remote terminal of higher-end Nikon DSLRs. Once nestled into place, the Unleashed (its rather odd name) will sip very little power and communicate with any Bluetooth-enabled GPS device, writing the information directly into the image EXIF data.
The dongle will work with the D200, D300, D700, D2X, D2Xs, D2Hs, D3, D3X, and Fuji S5 Pro (this last is a Nikon body in Fuji clothing) and can be bought with an optional shutter adapter. This runs from the unit to the remote release socket and – sometime in the near future – you will be able to fire your camera via Bluetooth, too.
All in all a very smart solution to geotagging. But there’s a hitch. The Unleashed will cost around €200 on launch, which is around $250. Considering it’s wireless, that doesn’t seem too bad next to Nikon’s own (wired) GP-1, which goes for $200. Until you remember that you still need to buy the GPS unit itself.
That’s right. You’re essentially paying $200 for a Nikon-compatible Bluetooth dongle. We’re sure there’s a market out there for this, but we’ll skip it. There might be a reason that the German company behind this widget is called Foolography.
Product page [Foolography via Crave]
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