The PhotoTrackr mini is promised to be smaller and faster than the original PhotoTrackr. For those not familiar with the system, it's basically a USB stick loaded with a GPS. You sync it to your camera's time (through bundled software), and then just carry it with you on photo shoots. The end result is a timed list of locations that can sync with your photos on your computer.

As for the mini itself, other improvements include RAW file and Mac support, meaning that the formerly good idea has become practical to about 90% of people out there who might consider actually adopting it. The PhotoTrackr mini costs $70 and is available now. [Phototrackr via SlashGear]

Essentially an SD card with GPS Wi-Fi triangulation, the 2GB Eye-Fi Geo (like Eye-Fis of yore) fits into any SD card slot. It records location information along with your pictures through integrated GPS. Then it can sync over Wi-Fi to your home computer or internet sites of choice. Fully iLife '08 and '09 compliant, the Geo may sound a lot like the Eye-Fi Home. It's essentially the same thing, but you get unlimited geotagging on top of home syncing.

EYE-FI INTRODUCES THE EYE-FI GEO APPLE EXCLUSIVE WIRELESS MEMORY CARD WITH
UNLIMITED GEOTAGGING
Eye-Fi Offers Users an Effortless Geotagging and Photo Sharing Experience When Using iPhoto, an iPhone or MobileMe

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., July 29, 2009 - Eye-Fi Inc. today unveiled the Eye-Fi Geo card, a new wireless SD memory card exclusive to Apple that allows users to automatically upload photos from a digital camera to a computer and offers lifetime geotagging service. Available today in all Apple stores and online, the Eye-Fi Geo card is the latest addition to the Eye-Fi product family that is built to seamlessly integrate with Mac products and applications, including iPhoto '09 and '08, the iPhone and MobileMe.
"Apple users want simplicity and an effortless user experience, so it's not surprising that a significant number of our users are on Macs," said Jef Holove, CEO of Eye-Fi. "The Eye-Fi Geo is the perfect companion for iPhoto's new ‘Places' application to pinpoint photos on a digital map so memories are displayed in a richer, more meaningful way."
The Eye-Fi Geo wirelessly uploads photos straight to a folder on your computer or Apple's iPhoto gallery where they arrive automatically geotagged with location information about where the image was captured.
Eye-Fi continues to embrace its loyal Mac following by developing products that seamlessly integrate with Apple products and features. iPhoto '09's "Places" lets users search and sort photos by location using geotags from the Eye-Fi Geo card. Users can also upgrade their Eye-Fi Geo card to share images online at MobileMe or one of more than 20 other photo sharing and social networking sites for a $9.99 annual fee.
Earlier this year, Eye-Fi released the Eye-Fi application for the iPhone, which wirelessly uploads photos from the iPhone to the Web and into iPhoto, or organized folders on a computer. With Eye-Fi, users can aggregate all of their photos – from both an iPhone and a digital camera –to manage and share photos in one place regardless of which device the photos are taken on. Eye-Fi users with iPhones can download the app for free.
Eye-Fi's complete line-up of wireless SD and SDHC memory cards, including the Eye-Fi Pro and Eye-Fi Explore Video cards, range in price from $49-$149 and are available at www.eye.fi, in store at Apple Retail Stores and Best Buy locations, and at major online retailers such as Amazon.com, Walmart.com and Costco.com.
Eye-Fi cards have won numerous Mac product awards, including "Best of Show" at Macworld 2008 and The Mac Observer's "Editors' Choice Award 2008" at Macworld. For more information, please visit www.eye.fi/apple, or follow Eye-Fi on Twitter @EyeFiCard.

About Eye-Fi
Founded in 2005, Eye-Fi is dedicated to building products and services that help consumers navigate, nurture and share their visual memories. Eye-Fi's patent-pending technology works with Wi-Fi networks to automatically send photos and videos from a digital camera to online, in-home and retail destinations. Headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., the company's investors include LMS Capital, Opus Capital, Shasta Ventures and TransLink Capital. More information is available at www.eye.fi.

The Sony Ericsson W995a comes with Google Maps built-in to show to you where you are—using 3G triangulation, not GPS—and automatically adds your location to your photos.

As a Walkman player it uses dedicated physical playback buttons, supporting all the standard audio formats and including a built-in FM radio with presets. It also has Clear Stereo and Clear Bass technology, which Sony says enhances the audio quality, avoiding "channel leakage" and "bass distortion".

The Sony Ericsson W995a also comes with Media Go software, the newly announced media software that will allow you to access show and movies, as well as transcode video and music files optimized for the W995a hardware features.

Outside of that, the 550 and 550t (the latter adds topographic US maps) appear to be the same GPS device that users have come to expect from earlier Oregon models. Obviously, it would be nice if a cellphone was part of the package here, but keep in mind that this is intended to be a more robust GPS device for people mountain biking, climbing, hiking and otherwise traveling in the rugged wilderness—not those trying to find the nearest Starbucks.

Picture perfect: Garmin® Oregon® 550 with built-in camera
offers touchscreen GPS for all seasons, all reasons

OLATHE, Kan./May 7, 2009/Business Wire - Garmin International Inc., a unit of Garmin Ltd. (NASDAQ: GRMN), the global leader in satellite navigation, today announced the Oregon 550 and Oregon 550t touchscreen handheld GPS devices, integrating a 3.2 megapixel digital camera, which creates geotagged images, and a 3-axis compass into the popular series of intuitive touchscreen handhelds. The waterproof Oregon 550's easy-to-use interface and versatile features make it the ideal solution for customers looking for a multipurpose GPS device.

"As everyone looks for ways to do more with less, Oregon 550 and Oregon 550t can be the one GPS device you turn to for all of your activities, in any climate, on any terrain, at any time of year," said Dan Bartel, Garmin's vice president of worldwide sales. "Easy enough for beginners to master, Oregon will guide you in your adventures, capture the highlights and bring them back home."

There's no need to tote a separate camera in your pack or pocket as Oregon 550's 3.2 megapixel autofocus digital camera with 4x digital zoom automatically geotags each photo with the location of where it was taken, allowing you to mark, remember and navigate back to that exact spot in the future. With this waterproof digital camera, you can take and view pictures in landscape or portrait orientation, and 850 MB of internal memory offers ample storage. These pictures can then be printed or stored and shared online, making every trip even more memorable. Once your Oregon 550 is connected via USB, you can use my.Garmin.com to detect Oregon's photos, simplify the selection and uploading processes and then store those photos on Picasa, a popular online photo sharing community for friends and families around the world.

The built-in 3-axis compass and enhanced sunlight-readable touchscreen are two other key additions to the Oregon 550 and Oregon 550t (which features preloaded 100K topo maps for the entire U.S. in state-of-the-art 3D elevation perspective). The 3-axis tilt-compensated electronic compass shows your heading even when you're standing still, without holding it level. And Oregon's glove-friendly, color 3-inch touchscreen display is brighter and easier than ever to read and use in all conditions, responsive to the touch of your finger, yet resistant to the forces of nature. Weighing only 6.8 ounces, the Oregon 550 and Oregon 550t come with two precharged AA NiMH batteries. These batteries provide up to 16 hours of life on a single charge and don't lose energy when not in use. The included battery charger saves you money and reduces waste as batteries get recharged and reused. Also in the box is a carabiner clip and USB cable for high-speed USB connections. A microSD card slot provides even more storage for photos, mapping and memory and allows you to view pictures from other devices with Oregon's picture viewer.

Highlighting its versatility, Oregon lets you customize five profiles - automotive, marine, recreation, fitness or geocaching - making the most useful features the easiest to access through shortcuts.

On the trail: With its high-sensitivity, WAAS-enabled GPS receiver and HotFix™ satellite prediction, Oregon 550 locates your position quickly and precisely and maintains its GPS location even in heavy cover and deep canyons. And you can store up to 2,000 waypoints, 200 routes, 5,000 geocaches and a tracklog of up to 10,000 points and 200 saved tracks. On the mountain: The built-in barometric altimeter tracks changes in pressure to pinpoint your precise altitude, and you can keep an eye on changing weather conditions by plotting pressure over time. On vacation: Explore with confidence, thanks to the detailed U.S. topographic maps preloaded in the 550t or the worldwide shaded relief basemap in the 550. On a mission: The simple-to-use touchscreen interface makes it easy to navigate efficiently and tackle your task quickly. In a group: With Oregon 550, you can share your waypoints, tracks, routes and geocaches wirelessly other Oregon and Colorado users. Out geocaching: Go paperless with Oregon, which can store up to 5,000 caches, by quickly downloading cache information from Geocaching.com. Oregon stores and displays key information such as location, terrain, difficulty, hints and description, so that you don't have to tote printouts with you. (And lucky geocachers may even stumble upon a limited-edition Oregon geocoin.)

And Oregon does the work of several devices, just by adding various accessories to suit your activity or optional MapSource® microSD cards preloaded with detailed maps.

On the road: Optional City Navigator mapping provides detailed street maps, millions of preloaded points of interest and onscreen turn-by-turn directions to your destination, and an optional Auto Nav kit adds a suction mount and car charger. On a hunt or on a hike: Using a separate TOPO U.S. 24K DVD or microSD card brings you the highest level of topographic detail available, with maps comparable to 1:24,000 scale USGS maps, featuring terrain contours, topo elevations, summits, routable roads and trails, parks, coastlines, rivers, lakes and geographical points. On the water: Add BlueChart® g2 maps, which provide everything you need for a great day on the water, including depth contours, navaids and harbors. On the run or on a bike: Ideal for a trail workout, the lightweight Oregon is compatible with Garmin's heart-rate monitors and speed/cadence sensors, and an optional handlebar mount makes it easy to track your speed, distance, elevation and location.

And wherever you are, whatever you're doing and whomever you're with, you'll always have Oregon 550's built-in camera to capture the moment, record the location and share the memories.

[Garmin]

The national maps—like the one above, which shows the most photographed landmark in each of the top 20 most photographed cities—are somewhat predicable, with photo density at its highest around population centers, especially large, scenic ones. Natural sights, like the Grand Canyon, make a strong showing, and the results generally support my theory that most peoples' vacations consist of trudging to a location of note, snapping a photo to prove that, yes, they actually went, and going directly back home, depressed.

The results get much more interesting at a local level. On the left are New York City and San Francisco, which were the first and third most photographed cities, respectively. Popular tourist destinations are prominently featured on these maps, but in addition the increased density of photos between these destinations form a sort of photo "track" along which tourists, apparently anxious for lack of monument-type things to photograph, take pictures anyway.

Researchers are said to be mulling the possibility of constructing some kind of online travel guide from the wisdom of the photo-taking crowd. Regarding that "wisdom": Apple's Manhattan cube store, a place that sells iPods, is the 5th most photographed place in NYC—just in front of the Statue of Liberty, which probably welcomed your ancestors to this country. What now, James Surowiecki?

Read the full report here (WARNING: there's math). [Physorg]

The HDR-TG5V is the evolution of the Sony HDR-TG1, and it certainly sounds like a premium device. It features a titanium frame, LCD touch interface and shoots 1920x1080 video (10X optical zoom) along with 4MP stills (face detection included). AVCHD video is recorded to 16GB of internal storage along with GPS coordinates should you want to track your adventures.

But as CNET points out, there's no GPS metadata standard in AVCHD, so the information can only be sewn to your videos through proprietary software. That's not Sony's fault, but it does make their camcorder's main new feature a bit less appealing.

If you're interested, you can look for the HDR-TG5V this May for "about $1000." [Sony via CNET]

The trick, if we're interpreting Tidbits's findings correctly, is that the iPhone may (in the future) have a location application that tracks where you are at all times. By associating the timestamp of when your photo was taken to the timestamp in your phone—which has the related location information—you can then geotag your photos after you've synced them to iPhoto.

Or, the resource could mean something completely different. And nobody knows whether or not this is gonna happen, especially since using the GPS or location features on the iPhone drains its battery fairly rapidly even in the background, but it's one cool potential use. [Tidbits via Ars Technica via Engadget]

Compatible with the D200, D3, D700, D90, D300 and D3X, the GP-1 is an absolutely no-frills peripheral featuring a couple of LEDs to signal GPS connectivity and not much else. Location information is added as metadata to each saved photo, so at least the user experience is fairly seamless. The GP-1 is available at retailers now for $240. [Nikon via Wired]

NEW COOLPIX P6000 OFFERS DIGITAL SLR SHOOTING CONTROL IN A COMPACT CAMERA
New Performance Series Camera Enables Users to Test the Photography World with Creative Control and "Geo-tagging" Capabilities with built-in GPS

MELVILLE, NY (Aug. 7, 2008) - Nikon Inc. today introduced its newest flagship COOLPIX compact camera, the COOLPIX P6000. Featuring 13.5 megapixels, a new, built-in global positioning system (GPS) unit, my Picturetown connectivity and the power of Nikon's exclusive EXPEEDTM image processing concept, the P6000 offers the perfect photographic tool for the photo and camera enthusiasts seeking the creative control of a D-SLR in the compact body of a COOLPIX camera.

"We are eager to see the response to the integration of the new capabilities for COOLPIX cameras, as the demands of our consumers are always a priority in product design," said Bill Giordano, general manager marketing, COOLPIX for Nikon Inc. "The P6000 is an exciting product offering for Nikon's COOLPIX line, as it not only provides expanded creative control for photo enthusiasts, but also empowers them with GPS functionality and my Picturetown connectivity."

The P6000 knows where the "best shots" are taken, thanks to the integration of the new GPS unit. With the added GPS function, P6000 users will be able to record "geotags" of the location where their images are captured based on latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates. This further heightens the photographic experience, allowing users to pinpoint the location via maps available in Nikon ViewNX Software, my Picturetown, Nikon’s photo sharing and storage website, or any other software or website that recognizes GPS data.

Additionally, the P6000 makes my Picturetown connectivity for uploading and sharing photos simple and easy, thanks to added wired LAN support via a dedicated Ethernet port built-into the camera. Users can upload their images and data directly from the P6000 with an Ethernet cable to the secure Picture Bank service on my Picturetown.

In line with other COOLPIX P-Series cameras, the P6000 includes intuitive controls via dedicated command and mode dials, providing easy access to shooting controls and exposure mode settings. The P6000 offers Programmed Auto [P], Shutter-priority Auto [S], Aperture-priority Auto [A] and Manual [M] modes granting users the ability to tap into the creativity of D-SLR functions while maintaining the simplicity of COOLPIX functionality. Owners can utilize two user-defined settings, a shooting menu, an efficient, tabbed menu interface, as well as customizable Function buttons to quickly switch between camera settings.

Additional shooting innovations engineered to maximize image quality and offer greater control over the final results include Nikon’s original COOLPIX Picture Control System and a new NRW*(RAW) support. The COOLPIX Picture Control System features intuitive controls that enable users to adjust their images to pre-set parameters such as Standard, Neutral, Vivid and Monochrome and apply tweaks to image sharpening, tone compensation, brightness, overall tone and saturation. Furthermore, images shot in the all-new NRW* (RAW) format can be opened and viewed in Nikon ViewNX Software (available early October 2008) for increased editing abilities.

Adding even more synergy between D-SLR cameras and compact COOLPIX cameras, the P6000 incorporates a pop-up flash, optical viewfinder for easy composition and the added bonus of system expansion with an optional convertor, Speedlights, and wireless remote control. Nikon's new 0.76x Wide-angle Convertor WC-E76 offers users the option to utilize focal lengths as wide as 21mm (35mm format equivalent). P6000 users can also take full advantage of Nikon's Creative Lighting System with the built-in accessory shoe that supports Nikon's i-TTL flash control, which enables wireless control over one group of remote Speedlights including the newly announced SB-900 Speedlight.

The P6000 features a quality finish and a front panel constructed of solid Magnesium alloy, as well as a comfortable grip and well-placed controls for streamlined performance. The new P6000 camera is compatible with new high-capacity SDHC cards, and utilizes a Nikon EN-EL5 rechargeable Li-ion battery. The P6000 also comes bundled with the COOLPIX Software Suite for editing, organizing and sharing images.

The Nikon COOLPIX P6000 will be available nationwide beginning September 2008 at a MSRP of $499.95.** For more information about the P6000 and other COOLPIX cameras, please visit www.nikonusa.com.

[Nikon]

Just remember, these kinds of screenshots can be made in one minute with the SDK or the independent Toolchain. [appleinsider]

And in a few years, you might not need to sling a set of extra batteries with you—Westfall says that fuel cells with "maybe twice the capacity as lithium-ion batteries" are on the horizon, which, combined with OLED displays (which are also brighter, clearer and all-around sexier) translate into a shitpot more snaps before your battery begs for more smack.

Even if the switch to fuel cells takes a stretch to actually happen, the OLED transition won't—Canon has been dumping a lot of cash into the tech, giving them "the infrastructure needed to bring this online." It won't just be in the super high-end stuff either, they're planning to "implement OLED in all our consumer products: digital still cameras, camcorders, and inkjet printers."

Yeah, the megapixel race might be over, but this is just getting good. [Crave]