The Camera That Knows Where It Is

As a bonus, the Skyhook system is self-healing. Suppose, for example, you’re standing on the street in Brooklyn. Your iPhone recognizes six Wi-Fi base stations around you — but one of them, according to the Skyhook database, is supposed to be in Connecticut.

Clearly, somebody moved (or moved the base station). Skyhook’s software says, “Well, the other five base stations are right where they’re supposed to be, but that sixth one looks suspicious. I’ll update my records to show that it has been moved to Brooklyn.”

Skyhook’s biggest weakness is coverage. The 50 million hot spots it knows, the company says, is enough to cover 70 percent of the populated areas in the United States and Canada, and 50 percent of Europe. But that means that the Eye-Fi card draws a blank in some of the situations when you’d most want a location fix for your photos: hiking, skiing, camping, boating or traveling abroad. These are places where you’re not likely to find any Wi-Fi signals at all.

(If that prospect bothers you, consider the $150 G.P.S. Photo Finder from ATP instead. After taking some photos, you slip your memory card into this tiny box, which stamps each picture with your current G.P.S. location. It’s more trouble than the Eye-Fi system, but at least it’s real G.P.S.)

On the other hand, Skyhook’s biggest strengths are how well it works indoors and how fast it works — one second for a fix. That makes it a perfect complement to G.P.S., which works terribly indoors, if at all, and can take up to a minute to find you.

(Indeed, the new iPhone, coming July 11, incorporates both G.P.S. and Skyhook. It even has a third location system, developed by Google, that pinpoints your location by studying your proximity to cellphone towers. That iPhone will really know where you are.)

Apart from the new geotagging feature, the new Eye-Fi card is the same as its geographically impaired predecessor, which is to say that it has the same downsides. For example, the card sends only JPEG files, not movies or RAW files. You can’t choose which photos to upload; the card always sends everything.

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Two traditional Eye-Fi drawbacks, though, have been fixed. Formerly you never knew when the card was finished transmitting photos; now, Eye-Fi can send a text message to your phone when it’s safe to turn off the camera.

Nor are you limited to your own home hot spot anymore. For $15 a year, your card can use any of Wayport’s 10,000 commercial hot spots in the United States, or indeed any hot spot that’s completely open (no password, no welcome screen). The first year is free with the Explore card.

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There’s a lot of great technology at play here. The Skyhook network, incomplete though it may be, is just wickedly clever — you can’t believe that it works, let alone works so well, at least in the 8,000 cities it covers.

Skyhook technology is also available in AOL Instant Messenger, so you can see where your chat buddies are; in location-based games like Plunder and AreaCode; and in software like Trapster, which lets drivers report speed traps when they see one — and then Trapster-equipped drivers following behind are warned on their cellphones. There’s even a browser toolbar that lets you try finding yourself: loki.com.

And when the Eye-Fi card’s pictures do arrive on your computer, being able to see where they were taken is more than a novelty. It’s a huge leap forward in the art and the utility of digital photography.

David Pogue is a columnist for the New York Times and contributor to CNBC. He can be emailed at: .

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times

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