A few weeks ago, I bought a gadget I’d been contemplating for awhile: an Eye-Fi wireless SD card, designed to transfer photos from camera to computer over a home network. Its slogan: “No wires. No hassles. No kidding.” Every once in awhile, it works as advertised. But mostly, I’ve spent more time unsuccessfully troubleshooting it than shooting pictures with it.

Which means I’ve spent a lot of time in the Eye-Fi support pages, reading items like this:

Range variability

The wireless range of your Eye-Fi Card for photo and video uploads is listed as 45 feet indoors and 90 feet outdoors. These values are under ideal conditions, camera bodies, walls, building materials and other electronic devices can contribute to reducing your card’s wireless range. When encountering wireless upload failures from within your camera, move your camera closer to your wireless router. Generally if you are within 15-20 feet in line of sight of the router you should be fine. Take several pics and wait for a minute or two to see if the card uploads. If it still fails, remove the card from the camera and insert it into your computer via the supplied card reader. This will allow for maximum range since the card’s antenna will not be constrained by a camera body.

In other words: You might need to make sure there are no walls in between your camera and your router, and if that doesn’t work, you might need to put the card into the computer, as you might have done if you’d used a plain old SD card. Doesn’t sound hassle-free to me!

I know that I’ve been the victim of bad luck, possibly stemming from my network rather than the card–folks who use the Eye-Fi tend to rhapsodize over it. But for the moment, I’ve gone back to transferring photos via a nice, boring, reliable wired connection. And it works. Every time.

Then there was the TechCrunch50 conference, which I attended a couple of weeks ago. Last year’s edition of the show was bedeviled by dreadful Wi-Fi connectivity. (I wasn’t there, but I’ve probably attended more industry events with crummy Wi-Fi than ones with decent service–which is one reason why I broke down and sprang for a Verizon EVDO adapter.) At this year’s TechCrunch, however, the Internet access was as robust as you could want–and it was apparently so good in part because it was provided in part via cables. As far as I could tell, the setup involved Wi-Fi access points, but each one had a bunch of old-fashioned Ethernet cables plugged into it, so most of the folks in attendance could get online by plugging in a cable rather than attempting to connect to a Wi-Fi network.

I won’t even discuss wired headsets vs. wireless ones, in part because I already have, repeatedly. And also because I’m currently experimenting with using a Bluetooth hands-free device in my car. It’s not bad. On the other hand, it’s not truly wireless, since I need to remember to plug it into its charger. And it has a tendency to inexplicably get de-paired from my iPhone. Like almost all wireless devices, it requires a degree of babysitting that most wired devices don’t.

And maybe I’m just an old fogy, but I’ve never warmed up to the idea of wireless keyboards and mice. Why force yourself to futz with batteries when USB not only establishes a reliable data connection between input device and PC but also delivers power, for less money?

I don’t wanna come off as a hater. I use multiple forms of wireless technology every day–Wi-Fi, EVDO, and my iPhone’s 3G. I’d kind of be lost without them, or at least a lot less productive. But whenever I undertake tech tasks that involve wired connections, I’m not left thinking “Gee, this is embarrassingly archaic and I can’t wait until I can do this wirelessly.” Actually, it usually reduces my blood pressure a tad, since I’m generally confident that whatever I’m trying to accomplish will, in fact, occur.

Like I said–if we’d all been using wireless connectivity for the past few decades and someone came up with Cables(tm), we might consider them to be a dazzling breakthrough. That said, I’m reasonably confident that I’ll live to see the day when almost nothing relating to computing involves wires of any sort. I just hope it’s an improvement on the current situation…

We have yet to hit the holiday shopping season, so you know there will still be plenty of gadget goodness before the year ends. However, there’s also some new behind-the-scenes tech to get excited about in 2009. Here are four enabling technologies to watch out for in the next four months. This tech may not be sexy, but it’s guaranteed to make those shiny gadget toys work better, smarter, faster.

NVIDIA ION Chipset

Since my netbook is clearly not cutting it for a lot of video playback, I’m psyched about new processors making their way into netbooks and small laptops in Q4. Most likely to actually hit the commercial market this year is the NVIDIA ION chipset, which is said to boost graphics power significantly in any Intel-Atom-powered device. According to Brad Linder over at Lilliputing (also heard as afternoon anchor on my local NPR station), two major manufacturers, Lenovo and Samsung, are planning to ship ION-powered laptops in the last few months of the year. And, Brad speculates that the upcoming Nokia netbook, the Booklet 3G, may also sport NVIDIA ION graphics. More info to come at Nokia World on September 2nd.

USB 3.0

If you’re into transferring a lot of media between devices, then the launch of USB 3.0 is right up your alley. Unlike USB 2.0, which transfers data at a rate of 480 Mbps, USB 3.0 boasts a whopping transfer speed of 4.8 Gbps. That’s not just good for moving HD video around, it’s also perfect for large back-up operations to an external hard drive. According to Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOM, USB 3.0 will start shipping to device-makers this year, with consumer availability soon to follow.

WiMAX

I know, I know, it’s cool to be down on WiMAX these days, but I’m still excited for it to spread to more cities (including my own Philadelphia) this year. Partly I’m excited about the higher speeds for mobile broadband, but partly I’m excited because of the different pricing options compared to existing 3G services. For example, my employer is unlikely to subsidize mobile broadband at $60 per month, but a $10 day pass is a good bet for reimbursement. Perfect for conferences, and other places where Wi-Fi tends to be lacking. Even an unlimited mobile contract is said to be only $50 per month. (See pricing coverage from Paul Kapustka at Sidecut Reports) That’s a better price and a faster connection.

Upstream Channel Bonding

And while we’re on the subject of broadband speeds, here’s an obscure one: upstream channel bonding. Channel bonding is what’s making it possible for cable operators to offer peak DOCSIS 3.0 speedsof 50-100 Mbps in some markets. To date we’ve only seen downstream channel bonding in the US, but upstream channel bonding is on its way. Karl Bode at Broadband Reports wrote earlier this month that Comcast is exploring upstream DOCSIS 3.0 trials this year, with upstream speeds maxing out at 120 Mbps.

The USB 3.0 Promoter Group, the body that oversees USB 3.0, announced today that it has completed work on version 1.0 of the specification. The specification has been dubbed “USB SuperSpeed,” and it can deliver over ten times the speed of today’s USB connections, or up to 5Gbps, according to the group’s Web site.

USB 3.0 remains backwards compatible with USB 2.0 Type A connectors, but sports new power management capabilities and handles data flow differently. Wiring changes provide for bidirectional data transfers; USB 2.0 is based on unidirectional data flow.

According to press reports, consumer USB 3.0 devices are slated to hit the market in 2010, and flash drives may be the first products to sport the new interface.

Whether real life performance lives up to promised performance remains to be seen; device overhead can sap theoretical speed. Demonstrations of devices were noted to be well under 5Gbps.

Still, the storage capacity of phones, media players, and other devices is increasing–if I get a device with much larger capacity two years from now and I can fill it up in the same time it takes to fill my iPhone today, I’ll be happy.

It’s a $50 cable that lets you connect two Macs–or a Mac and a Windows PC, or two Windows PCs–and shuttle files between them. One end of the cable has a lump (see above), and the lump contains Mac and Windows software that shows the folders on both computers and allows you to drag and drop folders and files:

Since the software’s in the cable, there’s no need to install anything (you just launch it directly from the cable). And unlike Target Disk Mode, you don’t need to reboot one computer and put it in a mode that doesn’t let you do anything else. If you’ve been using computers as long as I have, the whole experience will remind you of using Laplink.

I haven’t done any speed comparisons between this cable and Target Disk Mode–lemme know if you’re curious, and if there’s enough demand, I’ll try to do some.

Not everybody needs this cable–if your computers are both on a network, you can move files between them without any additional cost–but it does what it does nicely, and might be worth the investment–especially if you’ve got multiple Macs and Windows PCs.

I do think that Apple will eventually make Target Disk Mode work with USB connections; I make no predictions about when that may happen, though…