Eye-Fi Mobile X2: wireless data transfer memory card

The Eye-Fi Mobile X2 is the latest of Eye-Fi's clever memory cards that automatically upload your pictures to the internet. Like previous models, the card has a tiny Wifi transmitter inside it (it's exactly the same size as any other SD card).

Setup was fairly easy – you plug the card in using the supplied USB card reader, and start the supplied software, which also detected a new version online and updated itself automatically. Using the Eye-Fi Center software users can name their cards and configure where they upload pictures.

You can set the card up to automatically copy pictures, video or both to Flickr, Youtube, Facebook and all the usual suspects. That's not particularly useful if you want to edit your pictures first, so it also offers the option to copy pictures wirelessly to your home computer.

The ‘Mobile' in the name of this new card indicates that it can also copy directly to iPhone and Android phones, even if you're nowhere near a wireless network. The card sets up its own wireless network to which the phone connects. This was a bit clumsy to set up, though there's a clear thorough guide on the Eye-Fi website, and it worked well in practice. The only problem was that because the iPhone has no separate file storage facility, all the copied pictures were put in the iPhone's main photo library, which will lead to duplication if you end up copying both to a computer later.

The website in general was very helpful – another online guide, for instance, explains how to set the card up so it automatically copies pictures into a folder for use in the photo-management tool Adobe Lightroom, which would work equally well for Photoshop Elements, say.

Confusingly, all three new models in Eye-Fi's current range will do the mobile copying, including the £30-cheaper Eye-Fi Connect X2 (the only difference is that that card has 4GB of storage to the Mobile X2's 8GB).

It lacks the ‘geotagging' feature of some earlier Eye-Fi cards, which tags your photos with the location in which they were taken, though this can be added for a payment of $30.

This card may be a lot more expensive than a standard 8GB SD memory card, but if you want to make it much easier to upload your images, it's worth the extra money.