Articles tagged with: wifi

The rapid growth of mobile broadband is set to make Wi-Fi hotspots irrelevant, according to Ericsson's chief marketing officer Johan Bergendahl. Speaking to delegates at the European Computer Audit, Control and Security Conference in Stockholm, Bergendahl said: “Hotspots at places like Starbucks are becoming the telephone boxes of the broadband era.”

The world's first memory card with built in Wi-Fi, has now morphed into the world's first memory card with geotagging. From today the simple Eye-Fi card we've come to know and love will be split into three models - Home, Share and Explore.

The Share appears to be the standard model we've already seen, with ability to transfer shots from camera to a PC wirelessly, or to sites such as Skype via your home network. The Explore adds a roaming agreement - currently in the US only - to upload photos to photo sharing sites via a network of hotspots across the country. Lastly the least expensive, Home, is for simple transferring to PCs only.

As an added bonus the Explore gets the new geotagging service to add location information to each photo's EXIF data. It's not quite perfect as it doesn't use GPS but rather the Skyhook system as featured on the iPhone, which triangulates from known nearby hotspot locations.

They'll be on sale in the US for $79, $99 and $129. No word yet on when we'll see them here.

[Eye-Fi]

Using Wi-Fi across Europe could be about to get a lot easier. Hotspot network, The Cloud, has just introduced Mycloud, a service that joins several operators across the continent into one subscription.

Taking a short rest from knocking out DSLRs, Nikon's produced another of its Wi-Fi toting compacts. Taking its place in the Coolpix S series line-up, the 9mp S52c has a periscope-style, non-extending 3x zoom and VR optical image stabilisation for blur-free photography.

Hot on the heals of Nikon's S52c, Panasonic's launched its own Wi-Fi packed camera - the TZ50. If it looks familiar that's because it's essentially at TZ5 with a wireless chip bunged in, so you get a huge 10x wide-angle zoom (the equivalent of 28-280mm on an old 35mm cam), Panasonic's legendary Mega OIS anti-shake and a healthy 9.1 megapixels.