Importing

It’s clear what the main purpose of the Kit is: importing and managing photos and videos from digital cameras. What Apple doesn’t tell you is that you aren’t limited to using an SD card or the USB cable for your camera.

Most of the time, when you buy a MicroSD card, it comes with an adapter that lets you use the MicroSD in an SD card reader. Since part of the Camera Connection Kit is an SD card reader, this means you can, perhaps unsurprisingly, use it to read a MicroSD card as well. This also works with Memory Stick Pro Duo, the card Sony uses in its cameras as well as the PSP. All you need is an adapter to change it into an SD card.

The Kit also works great if you have an all-in-one card reader. If you do, you can use it in a USB port to read CompactFlash, MMC, Memory Stick Pro Duo and other types of card as well. One half of the Camera Connection Kit is a USB port, so, although the functionality is undocumented, a USB card reader will work. Reading the card isn’t as fast as when using a card directly in the slot or a USB cable, but it works and doesn’t break the iPad or the memory card, which is always a good thing.

One last thing that Apple does mention, but doesn’t push much, is using the USB slot in the Kit to connect your iPhone to your iPad. Unfortunately, you can’t do anything fancy like transferring apps or tethering, but you can import photos from your iPhone camera roll to your iPad. You can even use the iPhone camera while the devices are connected, and any new photos you take show up directly in the list on your iPad.

Saving Space

If, unlike me, you’re running out of space since your iPad is host to thousands of songs, videos, photos and apps, you can use the Camera Connection Kit to your advantage. Memory cards are fairly cheap nowadays; you can pick up an 8GB SD card for around $20. You can save precious space on your iPad by storing videos, such as TV shows and movies, on an SD card instead of directly on your iPad. When you want to watch them, plug the SD card reader into your iPad, pop in the card, and import the video (you can’t watch directly from the card). When you’re done, delete the video to make room again. The downside is keeping enough space free on your iPad to import the video. However, keeping about 1.5GB free still gives you more free space than you’d have if you had 8GB worth of video on the iPad.

Other Accessories

Since the iPad was released, people have been upset that it didn’t have a built-in USB port. Apart from a camera cable, USB keyboard or a headset, what would you plug into it? Probably not much else.

There are some keyboards that don’t work with the iPad; the Apple wired keyboard for one. If you try to use it, an error message will be displayed saying the accessory uses too much power, probably because of the keyboard’s two USB ports. However, a cheap Windows keyboard works just fine.

Headsets have the same issue. Some models work; others don’t. While I haven’t been able to test any personally, some users have been able to get them to work and say they work well.

To my knowledge, those are the only accessories that work with the iPad, but let us know in the comments if you’ve found any others that work using the Connection Kit.

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Still, you should be able to do at least as much as you can with the SD camera connector accessory that Apple’s officially releasing for use with the upcoming iPad. There’s no indication of whether or no that device will also work with the iPhone and iPod touch, but a third-party device by capitalization-challenged company zoomMediaPlus definitely will.

The accessory in question, called zoomit, will plug into your iPhone’s dock connector, and features an SD card slot that’s compatible with all currently available SD classes and capacities. Using a free app available from the App Store, you’ll then be able to access the data found on any card you insert.

A careful examination of zoomMediaPlus’ overly wordy press release reveals that you won’t be able to transfer files from your device to the SD card or vice versa, but you can view movies and photos, listen to music and preview documents stored on your external media. You can also share said media with others via email and various social networks, including Facebook. The only condition is that all of said media has to be in a format supported by iPhone OS 3.0 or higher, so those DivX files will definitely still require conversion.

At the very least, it should be incredibly useful for photogs on the go. You’ll be able to view and share you photos with others via the iPhone’s screen, which is undoubtedly better than the back of your camera in almost all cases. You should also be able to then create Facebook albums and post those photos to social network sites without first having to connect to a computer.

zoomMediaPlus envisions a future where content providers will sell specialized SD cards for use with the system:

In the future the zoomIt application will also support, among other things, protected content types enabling streaming of licensed music, videos, and other forms of protected content.

I wouldn’t count on this becoming a groundswell movement or anything, but it is an interesting possibility. Still, I see the value of being able to access documents anywhere without having to connect wirelessly to any kind of network. You take a look at soft proofs at an impromptu client meeting, or check out someone’s demo as long as they have it stored on SD media, which is fast becoming the only really strong player remaining on the flash card scene.

zoomit will retail for $59.95 when it is released in April 2010. You can save $10 now by pre-ordering, and get a free Kingston 4GB SDHC card in the bargain, but personally I prefer to wait until units actually begin shipping before putting down any kind of commitment.

I’ve always been tempted to try out an Eye-Fi SD flash memory card, which allows you to wirelessly upload photos directly from your camera to a nearby Mac or PC on the same network. Perhaps a bit anachronistically, since they seem to be far and away the leading digital memory format, but I don’t actually have a camera that uses SD. What with the price of point-and-shoots these days, I may soon rectify that situation, and Apple’s just given me another incentive.

As of today, Apple Stores (online and retail) will be the exclusive distributor of the brand new Eye-Fi Geo 2GB SD card. As its name implies, it will allow you to geotag your photos in addition to transferring them wirelessly to your computer. The new geotagging feature will allow you to use the Places feature in iPhoto ’09 by including metadata with every picture taken on the card about where it was shot.

Out of the box, the iPhone supports geotagging, but it isn’t yet a feature often included in most consumer digital cameras. The limited availability of the Eye-Fi Geo suggests that the reason why is that Apple is the only consumer photo library application to foreground geotagging capabilities. If you’d rather not pay a premium for the fancy new card, which costs $60 and only offers 2GB of storage, you can always manually enter location information into iPhoto after you’ve uploaded your photos.

In addition to geotagging, the Eye-Fi Geo offers the option to upload directly to MobileMe galleries or to various other social-networking sites, but for an additional $10 fee, which presumably activates a built-in software feature. I’ve yet to really use the geotagging features of iPhoto, but this card, and the added convenience of wireless uploading, has me mighty tempted to give it a try. Anyone picking one up and eager to share their impressions?

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However, as I learn more about the Secure Digital format, both what’s already available and what’s coming, I’m even more convinced that Apple made the right call.

For one thing, while ExpressCard 34 cards are smaller than the old PCMCIA CardBus cards they replaced, the standard SD Card format measures 32mm x 24mm in footprint (roughly the viewing area of a 35mm film negative or slide) vs. 75mm x 34mm for the ExpressCard, and it is only 2.1mm thick. That is especially helpful in computers as thin as Apple’s MacBook family — even more so if Apple builds a tablet or notebook smaller than the MacBook Air.

Another SD Card advantage is hardware standardization. The SD format shows potential for becoming the standard for removable storage in portable computers. The majority of PC laptops, and most netbooks, are available with SD Card slots, so Apple is no longer the odd man out in that context. Apple portables honcho Todd Benjamin told PCMag’s Mark Hachman in an interview that one reason the company went SD is that the format has become “really ubiquitous,” and not just in laptops. Consistent with Apple’s focus on consumer electronics and Mac market positioning as a digital hub, SD Card support is built into a myriad of consumer digital devices, especially cameras and Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs).

The iPhone doesn’t support removable storage as of yet, but in my opinion, it’s virtually inevitable that it will, and when it’s added, the tiny Mini SD variant (15mm x 11mm) is a likely bet.

SD Cards Just Have More to Offer

Currently, standard SD Card storage capacity tops out at a modest 4GB, but a much higher capacity variant, called SDHC, offers up to 32GB, and an eXtended Capacity SDXC spec that was unveiled at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show supports memory capacities above 32GB up to a potential 2TB, with data transfer speeds up to 104MB/sec and potential future throughput up to 300 MB/sec. The SDXC standard uses Microsoft’s exFAT file system (FAT64). Existing SD and SDHC host devices won’t be compatible with the new SDXC cards, but SDXC host devices will be backwards-compatible to work with SD and SDHC cards. A microSDXC card also is reportedly in the works for use in small mobile devices, with plenty of development headroom apparent in the SD format.

Cards conforming to SD (4MB to 4GB) and SDHC (4GB to 32GB) standards are supported by the slots in the new MacBook Pros. MultiMediaCards (MMC) can also be used in this slot, while MiniSD, MicroSD, and higher density formats like MiniSDHC and MicroSDHC can work but require “passive” adapters that conform to the standard SD width and thickness specifications.

MacBook Pro SD Card slots support a maximum throughput of 240Mbit/s, which exceeds the transfer rate of most SD media (about 17-21Mbit/s to 30Mbit/s, depending on type) by a substantial margin. MacBook Pros recognize cards inserted in their SD card slots as USB storage devices that can be mounted, read from, and written to as with any other USB storage device.

You can even make SD Cards (with a capacity of at least 8GB) bootable by changing their default partition table to GUID using Mac OS X Disk Utility and formatting the card to use the Mac OS Extended file format, instead of standard FAT32 DOS formatting. Macworld’s Roman Loyola has posted a video tutorial showing how to create a bootable SD Card. Loyola also reports that a variety of other Macs, besides the SD Card equipped mid-2009 MacBook Pros, including an iMac and a Mac mini, can be successfully booted from SD Card boot disks via a SanDisk MicroMate SD card reader.

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When I originally wrote about the introduction of the new 15″ MacBook Pro, I was curious as to if the newly featured SD card slot would support even newer SDHC cards. A little research later, I learned that the MacBook Pro does support this standard and has a few more tricks up its sleeve. So what’s all the buzz about the SD card slot?

Back to the Basics

SD (Secure Digital) cards are one of many competing formats for storing data onto flash-based memory cards (similar to how iPod nanos and iPod shuffles work). Among other competing formats, such as Memory Stick (Sony) or CompactFlash, SD has become one of the more popular types, found in newer digital cameras and camcorders.

Great. What’s This Mean for MacBook Users?

When Apple introduced Intel Macs in 2005, many were surprised to see that they could be booted from a USB drive in addition to FireWire, as had been the standard among PowerPC Macs. Many were surprised to find out last week that with the addition of the built-in SD card slot in these new Mac portables, they are also capable of being booted from this format. While this isn’t exactly feasible, as SD cards are still more expensive than optical media for comparable capacity, it really does speak highly for the robustness of the Mac platform. Of course, what would you expect? You can now pretty much boot a Mac from any device you can connect to it, from a FireWire hard drive, to an SD card, to your iPod. (Try that on a Windows computer!)

Hidden Secrets of the SD Card Slot

In addition to being able to boot from the SD cards, the new SD card slot supports most MultiMediaCards (MMCs) as they are physically similar to SD cards. Derivatives of SD card technology, such as MiniSD, MicroSD, MiniSDHC and MicroSDHC, can also be used with appropriate adapters.

What Doesn’t Work…At Least, That We Know Of

CES 2009 brought about the announcement of a newer format, called SDXC, which will allow for capacities up to 2TB in size. Due to the relatively recent announcement of this technology, and only one or two types of this card in existence, I am unaware if this card can be read by the new MacBook Pros.

Another implementation of SD technology, called SDIO (for Secure Digital Input Output) is incompatible with the card slot. This new technology is designed to combine the functionality of an input/output device, such as an ethernet or bluetooth adapter, with an SD card for greater functionality.

Will We See This Spread?

Apple stunned almost everybody with the announcement of a built-in card slot for the MacBook Pros. Card slots in general really aren’t something Apple has favored in the past (opting for devices like iPods and iPhones to have completely built-in memory). Even its reluctance to spread the technology to the 17″ MacBook Pro indicates that Apple is testing the reception of having this functionality built into its portables. During the keynote address, Phil Schiller mentioned that Apple knew that a very small percentage (less than 10 percent) of its users actually used the ExpressCard slot on its portables. If Apple is capable of tracking usage this accurately, then it stands to reason that if the SD card slot proves popular, it could be expanded to the other products as well.

SD technology is certainly very robust, and with newer standards and higher capacities around the corner, it is keeping up with changing times. This is the exact kind of stability Apple looks for when deciding to go with a new standard, such as including USB or adding FireWire 800 or gigabit ethernet to its products. With more and more consumer electronics using SD cards, the addition of a built-in slot is definitely a “win” for consumers.

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