Jul 28

Samsung’s Wi-Fi Camera Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Computer

Posted in: Today's Chili, wi-fi

Samsung has put a Wi-Fi radio inside its latest digicam, the ST80. The camera is pedestrian in almost every regard, from its ho-hum zoom range (35-114mm equivalent), through its 3-inch screen with just 230,000 dots to the too-big 14.2-megapixel sensor. But the saving factor is that Wi-Fi, which means that you can share your pictures without a computer.

In addition to email, you can upload images to Facebook, Picasa, YouTube and Photo Bucket. The touch-screen also lets you carry out basic editing first: you can crop, for example. The ST80 will also shoot 720p video at 30fps in H.264, and comes with an Boingo account to access Wi-Fi hotspots on the go.

This is the direction that more and more cameras will take. As smart-phones get better and better cameras, their connectivity becomes much more useful. With the iPhone, you can shoot video and stills, edit them and send them out to the world. Dumb cameras don’t even come close. Samsung has bets on both sides, with digicams and phones in its lineup, but we’re certain that those lines will blur more and more.

The ST80 will be available in September for $250.

Company press page [Samsung]

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Jul 27

ShutterSnitch and Eye-Fi: Wireless Camera Tethering for iPad

Posted in: ipad, tablets, Today's Chili, wi-fi

Back in May, we took a look at a ShutterSnitch, an iPad app that lets you receive photos wirelessly from your camera. Combined with an Eye-Fi wireless SD card, you can shoot away and have the photos pop up on the big screen in seconds. It’s like shooting tethered to a laptop, only about a zillion times more convenient.

So why are we revisiting the subject? Because it got a whole lot easier to use. Now, the tricky networking part has been simplified and you need only follow a few steps to get things up and running. The first time you do this, you’ll need to configure both the Eye-Fi card (using the Eye-Fi Center) if it is not already aware of your Wi-Fi network, and also the ShutterSnitch app (just enter the Eye-Fi username and password).

From there, you simply need to shoot, with one weird caveat: you need to create a “collection” in ShutterSnitch to receive the photos. That’s it. Now you can beam the photos across as you shoot.

There are plenty of things you can do within the application. As you shoot, the images are shown full-screen, with or without shutter-speed, aperture and histogram overlays. Once done, you can keep the photos in ShutterSnitch, mail them, organize them, upload to Flickr and pass them off to the iPad’s own photo-library, from where it can be sent off to any other photo-editing application you might have.

There is one big gotcha. You’ll need to have a Wi-Fi network running to make this all work: The Eye-Fi cannot beam direct to the iPad. That means you’ll need either a portable hotspot like the MiFi, be in a place where there is already a network, or create one using a laptop (which kind of defeats the point of this). I’m going to pick up an Eye-Fi card this afternoon and also investigate jailbreak solutions for ad-hoc network creation on the iPad. If it works, I’ll let you know.

From Eye-Fi to iPad [Eye-Fi blog]

Eye-Fi Card, iPad, and ShutterSnitch for Wireless Transfer [The Digital Story]

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Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.




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Jun 21

SFO Airport to Offer Free Wi-Fi

Posted in: Today's Chili, wi-fi

Good news for San Francisco travelers (not to mention those with lengthy layovers in the city by the bay): SFO is set to become the third of the Bay Area’s major airports to offer free Wi-Fi, following the leads of the San Jose and Oakland airports.

Free service will arrive at SFO on September 1st, replacing T-Mobile’s premium service. “In our passenger surveys, that was the one issue that came up over and over: They wanted free Wi-Fi,” SFO spokesman Mike McCarron told The San Jose Mercury News.

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Jun 21

Wi-Fi Only Nook for $150 in Best Buy

Posted in: e-books, Media Players, nook, Today's Chili, wi-fi

Barnes and Noble has just taken the e-book market a notch further towards the mainstream with a new Wi-Fi-only Nook for $150: $50 less than Wi-Fi+3G model, and $110 less than you’d pay in a Barnes & Noble store for the original version [UPDATE: B&N will also drop the price of the 3G Nook to $200].

The new Nook is available from Best Buy right now, and apart from the lack of a 3G radio it is almost exactly the same as its big brother: 2GB on-board memory supplemented by a microSD slot, a 6-inch e-ink display along with the vestigial color touch-screen, a ten-day battery life and support for most popular picture and e-book file formats, including the EPUB format eschewed by Amazon for the rival Kindle. The only visual difference is the change of the back cover from gray to white.

This is great news, and a very sensible decision from B&N. Who, after all, needs to be able to buy a book at any time, in any place? Just stock up with a few titles and wait until you find the next Wi-Fi hotspot (or pop into Starbucks where the internet is now free). And if you really do need that 3G connection, well, you can just pay a little extra (and just $50 extra, too, not the $130 premium Apple loads onto the 3G iPad).

The trend is clear. Basic grayscale e-book readers are set to become a commodity device, probably occupying a large but cheap specialty niche between tablets and cellphones. We wouldn’t be too surprised if the Nook also lost that novelty touch-screen and dropped below $100.

Wi-Fi-only Nook eReader [Best Buy]

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Jun 14

With Nokia E73, T-Mobile Keeps Wi-Fi Calling Alive

Posted in: nokia, t-mobile, Today's Chili, wi-fi

One of the less-touted features of the new Nokia E73 Mode is Wi-Fi calling, something T-Mobile should be promoting a lot more heavily. But T-Mobile’s Wi-Fi calling strategy seems confused right now, which is a pity – making calls over Wi-Fi is a win-win for the carrier and for consumers.

Here’s the secret: according to a T-Mobile exec I spoke to, if you’re using an E73 (or one of a few other phones), you’re connected to a Wi-Fi hotspot, and T-Mobile has lousy coverage where you are, the call will just quietly be routed over the hotspot. No muss, no fuss, no configuration, no confusion. It’s a great in-building solution, far more user-friendly than the expensive and limited “micro-cells” that AT&T and others are selling right now.
T-Mobile used to be much more aggressive on the Wi-Fi front. I’m a subscriber to @Home, a $9.99 home-phone-replacement service which T-Mobile stopped selling a few months ago. It’s been very reliable for me (as reliable as my ISP, at least.)
The E73 shows that T-Mobile is still capable of using UMA technology (their Wi-Fi calling scheme), if not marketing it. The company needs to step up and show off this strength by portraying it as the great in-building solution it is. My suggestion – “Why buy an expensive micro-cell? If you own a Wi-Fi router, you already have one!”
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Jun 14

AirStash Wireless SD Card Reader: Perfect iPad Companion?

Posted in: ipad, sd, Today's Chili, usb, wi-fi

The AirStash is a USB card reader combined with a Wi-Fi hotspot. Its purpose in life is to stream media to other devices, which means sending movies, music and video to phones, tablets and other memory-limited gadgets.

We first saw the AirStash back in January when a prototype was shown at CES. Since then it has gotten a price ($100) and gone on sale. You might also remember that, in the meantime, Apple released a new kind of computer.

Now, the AirStash won’t help you if you are desperately waiting for the sold-out Apple Camera Connection Kit (the AirStash is similarly back-ordered), but it could be ideal for iPad-toting photographers who hate plugging things in. You just pop your SD card into the slot and then dial in from Safari. From there you can browse a list of photos, view them and save them to your photo-roll. Better, it works as a mass-storage USB device, so you could actually plug it into the iPad via the connection kit.

The only problem is that the transfer is a little clunky: there’s no way to grab all the images at once. What may work, though, is using an iPad app called ShutterSnitch (also covered in Gadget Lab, this time in May). ShutterSnitch has its own FTP server, and normally pulls in images as you take them from an Eye-Fi card or a wireless transmitter. In theory, you should be able to combine the two for some fast wireless transfers (or fast-ish: the AirStash has a 802.11b/g radio).

It’s still a little awkward. The AirStash folks really need to write an App that pulls from their dongle to make things a little easier. Otherwise, this looks like a neat photographers’ toy.

AirStash [AirStash via John Nack]

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May 27

Wi-Fi Sync now compatible with Windows and iPad

Posted in: Apple, apple ipad, AppleIpad, AppleIphone, ipad, iPhone, ipod, ipod touch, IpodTouch, jailbreak, sync, Today's Chili, wi-fi, wifi, Windows, windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows7

Wi-Fi Sync is quite the gem (at least we think so) but it had some limitations — namely, it only worked on OS X for desktop, and only with iPhone / iPod touch. Developer Greg Hughes pinged us earlier today to let us know he’s thrown the gates off such restrictions. The jailbroken app now works for both iPads and Windows — XP, Vista, and 7. The desktop client is free to download but it still cost just a hair under $10 for the appropriate mobile device. Worth the price of breaking free from wires? Your call.

Wi-Fi Sync now compatible with Windows and iPad originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 28 May 2010 00:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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May 25

AT&T Can Save Their Network… With Wi-Fi? [At&t]

Posted in: att, new-york, Today's Chili, top, wi-fi, wifi, Wireless

AT&T’s latest idea is actually kind of brilliant on multiple levels: totally free Wi-Fi in Times Square. And it could be how they save their network. More »

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May 25

ATT Tests Free Wi-Fi in Times Square

Posted in: att, Today's Chili, wi-fi

nyc

There’s little reason to visit Times Square in New York unless you’re a sandal’n’socks wearing, guidebook-toting tourist (or if you work there), but AT&T just made visiting the tackiest plaza in Manhattan a little bit more attractive.

As of today, AT&T customers can grab free Wi-Fi when not buying helium balloons or miniature Empire State Buildings. This, we presume, is a way to improve the telco’s notoriously bad data performance in several metropolitan centers. The hotspot (singular) is located somewhere on 7th Avenue between 45th and 47th Streets. I like to think of it as being lodged between the McDonald’s golden arches and the TGI Friday’s sat next door. Once you have connected to any one of AT&T’s hot-spots, your phone should remember and flip over to any other AT&T spot whenever it encounters one.

This is AT&T’s first ever free outdoor hotspot, says the Wall Street Journal, and is a trial that could make its way out of tourist hell and into three other cities, and thence possibly into the world at large: Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco would be a perfect spot.

Setting up a Wi-Fi network is presumably a lot less hassle law-wise than getting permission for another cell-tower, and at least AT&T is doing something about its spotty network. It might not be an entirely fair test, though. Do the bridge-and-tunnel folks even have smartphones?

AT&T Sets Up Free Wi-Fi In Times Square to Ease iPhone Load [WSJ]

NYC photo: Charlie Sorrel




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May 13

Samsung CL80 will come with three months free Boingo WiFi, oh joy

Posted in: free, samsung, Today's Chili, wi-fi, wifi

While we’re still waiting for Sammy’s 14 megapixel, WiFi-enabled point-and-shoot to make its stateside appearance, it seems it won’t be lacking for software when it crosses the pond — this week, ubiquitous hotspot host Boingo announced that its service will be preinstalled on every new Samsung CL80 and ST5500, and the cameras will come with three free months of use. After that point, you’ll still be able to upload your pictures from Starbucks, never fear — you’ll just have to pay $8 monthly for the privilege. PR after the break.

Continue reading Samsung CL80 will come with three months free Boingo WiFi, oh joy

Samsung CL80 will come with three months free Boingo WiFi, oh joy originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 13 May 2010 15:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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