I had good luck with these at my wedding. Instead of disposable cameras, I put cheap digital cameras. It didn’t take long for guests to realise that the pictures were appearing on a large tv, in a sideshow. People got a lot more creative when they realised they would be seen quickly, not weeks later.
I managed to get them working without proprietary software, too. The onboard script logged into WiFi and uploaded the photos over ftp.
Given their size and the level of tech at the time, it was pretty impressive.
That’s awesome
Yup. It was used to transfer photos from a camera to a phone back in the day when cameras didn’t have wireless transfer features.
Had one for my iPaq in the early 2000s.
They’ve been around for a while. I used one with a 5D MkII several years ago. Horrible throughput. It was only useful for a quick transfer of a few images. Totally unsuitable for field dumps.
Things like this were huge back in the days of PDAs. They had SDIO ports specifically for expansion. I had one for Wifi and another for Bluetooth on my Garmin PDA, so I couldn’t use Bluetooth and Wifi at the same time, and both kept you from having non-volatile storage. If your battery died, your system was wiped because all the storage was in memory.
I got a Dell at the very end of the PDA era (the iPhone was already out, but was still ATT exclusive) that was super fancy because it had a CF card slot AND an SDIO port, so I could store data AND use my SDIO digital camera.
Was it the Axim x50? That was a fine looking PDA. I had an Axim x30 and loved it to death. Its death. Then, I got an IPAQ 210. They didn’t have any good accessories for that one. No clip on thumb keyboard or anything.
I don’t remember the model at all. I didn’t use it very long, as I ended up getting a Blackberry a few months later, and between it and my laptop I really didn’t need a PDA.
I used the Garmin iQue m3 for years though, since I had it earlier and it had a pop-out GPS antenna that kept it useful as a navigation tool in the car well into the 2010s.
I still have a 4gb Eye-Fi that use just as an SD card to shuttle files out to my laser cutter. I assume the wi-Fi would be horrendously slow and insecure if it worked at all. Was pretty cool when we still had a standalone P&S digital camera though.
Things like this would be so useful in the tinkering community, so many motherboards and such use micro SD cards or USB drives as a primary storage device. Before I gutted my 3d printer and put a computer inside it, I had to schlep the micro SD card back and forth from the printer to the computer room… being able to send it wireless would’ve been great. Looked into it at the time but as other have said all the current solutions are dog shit.
I thought it was cool.
There are also horseless carriages.