Add services to Eye-Fi cards--but not for free

(Credit: Eye-Fi)

Eye-Fi announced Monday that on October 5, users of its Share and Home Wi-Fi-enabled SD cards will be able to subscribe to the services available across all its cards. It's a great idea, right up until you get to the yearly service fees. It's $9.99 a year to add Web sharing to Home cards, and $14.99 a year each for geotagging and hot-spot access.

For those unfamiliar, Eye-Fi's Home card ($79) lets you send images directly from your camera to your computer over a Wi-Fi network. The $99 Share version--recently co-opted by Lexar--wirelessly connects your camera to more than 20 photo-sharing sites (now including AdoramaPix and Apple's MobileMe). Lastly, the Explore card gives you the ability to geotag images, as well as all the features of the other cards, and a year of Wayport wireless access for $129.

So, adding all the features of the Explore card to the Home card costs you an extra $40 a year to an already expensive 2GB card. I can understand the $14.99 for the Wayport subscription, but I'm not down with annual service fees for geotagging and Web sharing.

On the upside, Eye-Fi is promising double the wireless speeds for uploads at no extra cost to users. This will also happen on October 5.