iPad camera kit is incompatible with iPhone 4

Consumer Reports News: June 25, 2010 04:55 PM

Want to use your iPhone to share your summer vacation photos while you're away? You'll have to shoot them with the iPhone's own camera, not your favorite point-and-shoot, because as I found in our lab today, Apple's new $29 iPad camera connection kit isn't compatible with the new iPhone 4—which my colleague Mike Gikas reviews here—or the iPhone 3G S. (Neither the kit's SD card reader nor its USB adapter worked).

True, the connection kit is marketed for the iPad, so there was never any guarantee it would work with the iPhone. But the iPhone and iPad do use the same dock connector port, so one might be forgiven for thinking that a camera connector marketed for one would work with the other.

After all, the $49 Apple composite AV cable I use with my iPod Touch worked fine recently when I used it to connect my iPad to a flat screen TV. (I would have hated to shell out another $49 for yet another cable just for the iPad).

Of course you can transfer photos from your digital camera to an iPhone using a computer—if you feel like lugging one along on the trip or traipsing to an Internet café or a hotel's business center.

But how much easier would it have been if you could have simply popped a photo-filled SD card into the Apple adaptor and transferred your best shots to the iPhone in a matter of seconds?

There is a third-party SD card reader for the iPhone called ZoomIt, which costs $59. It's not yet clear how well it works or whether it's compatible with the iPad. It certainly won't let you use a Compact Flash card.

Oh, well. There's always next summer.

—Jeff Fox

—Jeffrey Fox