My mother-in-law has a tough job trying to find gifts for Steve and me. She knows we love tech stuff but what are the chances that she could find something cool that we don’t already have? Well this year she found something that maybe I don’t need but is still pretty cool. It’s called the HISY Wireless Smartphone Camera Remote without App. Yup, it’s got that long of a name.
Stepping back, what problem are we trying to solve? You’re trying to take a selfie but you have to be back far enough that you have to prop the camera up on something and now how do you actually take the photo?
The HISY remote is a small button, maybe an inch in diameter and a half an inch thick. It works over Bluetooth to activate the shutter on your iPhone or iPad. HISY makes an equivalent product for Android by the way but they call it HALO instead of HISY.
I thought this sounded like it would never work. I opened up the box, tapped the button once, turned on my phone and looked in Bluetooth to see if anything new had showed up, and sure enough there was the HISY remote. I connected in Bluetooth, opened the camera app and pushed the button…and my iPad took a photo. That’s it. That’s all the configuration I had to do to have a remote control to take photos.
Fast forward a week when I had Pat Dengler over for a play date, and I tried to show it to her but neither of our phones saw the device. Pat MADE me look at the instructions where it said to push a pin or something into the reset hole. A ring lit up red, then started blinking, indicating it was in pairing mode. Connected via Bluetooth and now I was in business with my iPhone. I guess I just got lucky with it the first time on my iPad, it seems to be reasonable to ask it to go into pairing mode, right?
My HISY is plain white but I see that you can get it in hot pink, neon green, aqua or black. It comes with two little pieces of plastic that had me baffled at first. One is a fold up stand for your iPhone. It took several of us to figure out how to unfold it at first and it’s kind of rickety. The other one had me baffled as well until Kyle figured it out. It’s a clear plastic peg with ridges in it and a tether. Turns out it just happens to fit in the headphone jack of your iPhone, an the tether will slide nicely into the HISY remote. I guess the idea is that you can have your HISY with you at all times for those emergency selfies. I’m not sure I’ll use the tether and I definitely won’t use the stand, but I will be keeping this in my purse with my other electronic gadgets to help me take better photos.
If it sounds like the HISY remote solves a problem you have, check it out for $16 on Amazon. Keep an eye on that price, it says $25 on the Amazon link but while I was writing this up it was actually $16.
I put the HISY on my Christmas list and my daughter bought it for me. It paired instantly with my iPhone, but I really want it for my iPad Air 2. I just ordered the insert to make my new iPad fit my old Padcaster,(http://thepadcaster.com/product/the-padcaster-adapter-clip/) so now I will have a remote control for taking video. I am so excited!
I guess everyone knows Amazon does airline pricing, changing prices all the time. When I clicked the $16 link from Podfeet, Amazon showed me the item, with a notice “there’s a newer version available.” Clicked that to see what the difference was. Best I could tell, $8. And now Amazon won’t show me the $16 model. Maybe if I log out, fire up the VPN, and change computers?
Didn’t go all the way and launch VPN, not only seeing higher price.