The Olympus PENpal is a Bluetooth widget that beams photos from your camera to your computer. It slides into the accessory shoe on the top of the Olympus PEN E-PL2 camera and is controlled by the camera itself.
This ingenious dongle integrates with the camera's own menus, and sends images to any device compatible with Bluetooth file transfers (which counts out the iPhone and iPad, as we noted in our full review of the E-PL2). It works like this: Browse your photos on the camera's screen as usual and then hit the menu button. From here, choose the "Send a Picture" option and you're done. The photo will appear on your computer a few moments later.
The PENpal will also resize photos before sending. Depending on your settings, it will shrink pictures to 1280 x 960, 1920 x 1440 or 640 x 480, and can store up to 2,600 pictures in its own memory.
This seems like an ideal solution for crappy cellphone cameras. You can take a snap with a proper camera and then send it to your phone for editing and uploading, letting both devices do what they're good at. This seems to be a trend in consumer electronics in general: We're moving away from convergence and the do-everything machines that entails, and coming to small ecosystems of networked devices. Camera, computer and tablet are all beginning to talk to each other.
It's just a shame that this won't work with the iPad, which really needs a camera, and that it is Olympus-only. At least it's cheap, though, at just $80.
Olympus PENpal [Olympus via Derek Story]
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