Flash Forward

Photo: Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

You’ve been busy snapping photos with your digital camera all day. Now you want to get those pics transferred to your tablet or laptop. The other devices don’t have a compatible SD card slot. What to do?

Toshiba’s FlashAir II offers a handy solution, embedding a miniature Wi-Fi access point into a standard SD card. Just like that, you can access photos on the card from up to seven other devices, connecting directly via Wi-Fi to the card’s access point.

If this sounds familiar, you’re probably thinking of the venerable Eye-Fi line of products, which combine an SD card and a wireless radio, giving your camera instant wireless capabilities. But Eye-Fi and FlashAir work quite differently. With Eye-Fi, your camera connects to an existing wireless network, which it uses to upload photos to the cloud or another PC on the LAN. FlashAir doesn’t require an existing network—in fact, it can’t connect to an existing network. Rather, FlashAir is its own wireless LAN, and you configure your other devices to connect to it.

For casual users, this is the going to be the cumbersome deal-breaker of the process. If you’re already connected to one network, having to tell your phone or tablet to disconnect from it and then reconnect to a temporary LAN set up by the FlashAir II, is messy and time-consuming. If your camera happens to get turned off at any time along the way, you must start all over. (Tip: Disable the “auto off” feature on your camera to get things working much more smoothly.)

Once you’re connected you have to use an app (iOS or Android) to access the photos on the device. You can get to the photos via a web browser on a PC or Mac (or on any mobile device, really), but there’s no native file access provided, so don’t go hunting for a network drive in Windows Explorer where you can quickly scan through all the photos.

Within the app, your options are fairly limited. You can save photos to local storage or send them via standard email or social networks direct from the app, and that’s about it. Simplicity is fine, but the app is on the buggy side, too. I spent way too much time dealing with a “start” button that refused to be pressed before eventually stumbling upon a workaround that got me into a thumbnail view of my pictures.

At a street price of $36 for a 16GB card, the FlashAir II has a substantial premium over a standard SD card, which costs about 10 bucks. On the other hand, the FlashAir II is substantially cheaper than a comparable Eye-Fi card ($65). So if adding wireless features to a camera is important to you, and you don’t mind getting your hands a bit dirty, it’s a solution that might make sense.