Back in 2010, our own John Biggs rightly described Parrot’s AR.Drone as ” the coolest thing [he had] seen in a long, long time.” Since then, Parrot has launched the AR.Drone 2.0 and while it’s still a very cool gadget, quadcopters have come a very long way since 2010. Last month, the folks at DJI, who mostly specialize in developing unmanned aerial systems for commercial use, sent me one of their consumer-oriented and GPS-enabled DJI Phantoms to review.
Most quadcopters are aimed at hobbyists and take a good amount of assembly and at least some experience with flying remote-controlled aircraft. The Phantom, which has a list price of $849 but currently retails for about $680, comes mostly pre-assembled and is extremely easy to fly, thanks to its built-in compass and GPS module. Thanks to having GPS built-in, the drone always knows where it is in relation to you. So depending on the mode you are flying in, every input you give will always be interpreted in relation to you and not in relation to where the front of the aircraft is (here’s a video that explains how this works).
The other cool thing about the GPS mode is that the drone can hover in position even if it’s windy. It’ll just auto-correct for the wind, thanks to its built-in autopilot (you probably want to turn this mode off when you are trying to take a video, however, as the constant corrections will show up in your videos).
This autopilot also kicks in if the Phantom loses its connection with your remote control if it flies out of reach or your remote runs out of battery, the drone itself is very low on battery, or because you turn it off to see if the autopilot actually works. Once the failsafe mode kicks in, the drone will simply fly up to 60 feet, fly back to where it first took off and land. I actually tried this and it worked surprisingly well. The drone touched down just about 3 feet from where I launched it. When you spent $700 on the drone and another $300 or so on a GoPro 3 Silver, that’s a nice feature to have.
The Phantom is a clear step up from something like the AR.Drone. Its communication distance is just under 1,000 feet and a maximum horizontal speed of about 32 feet per second and a descent speed of close to 20 feet per second. That’s fast and feels even faster if you are just learning how to fly it.
These specs show that this isn’t just a toy but can actually be used for some pretty impressive aerial photography. Indeed, since the Phantom launched earlier this year, a whole ecosystem has sprung up around it that provides owners with everything from improved propellers to cases and multi-axis camera gimbals. A gimbal, by the way, isn’t a must, but if you want to take really stable videos without the so-called “jello” effect (here’s a pretty extreme example of that), both a gimbal and some well-balanced after-market rotors will surely help.
Here is a video I took with the Phantom and a GoPro 3 White over the weekend:
The Phantom’s battery lasts just under 15 minutes, so you probably want to buy at least a second one, given that the package only includes a single 2,200mAh battery and a charger.
If you decide to get one of these, by the way, make sure you read the instructions and watch this series of videos before you turn it on. The Phantom may look like a toy and is easy to fly, but this is a pretty high-end piece of technology and there are a few things you need to know and do before your first flight.
With the 2013 NAB Show just around the corner, it’s a fair bet that DJI will announce a few new products in the coming days and we’ll make sure to keep a close eye on this company.
The service still puts a lot of emphasis on sharing media files. The updated editor now allows users to upload multiple images, audio files, videos and documents in parallel. In addition, Posterous users can now rotate images and reorder image galleries by simply dragging and dropping files. Starting today, Posterous users can also finally combine and ungroup galleries – a feature that comes in handy if you want to combine all the images from a recent trip, for example.
While everybody was talking about the 
What does this mean for users? First of all, Safari and every other application that uses WebKit, including the popular NetNewsWire RSS reader or the Konqueror browser for KDE, for example, will soon be able to rely on the same kind of crash protection that Google Chrome currently offers. Microsoft’s IE8 already features a similar crash-protection mechanism and as our own Sarah Perez 
During today’s 
At its core, the iBooks application is nothing else but just another iPhone app. As far as we can see, iBooks doesn’t rely on any special abilities that are only available in the iPhone OS 3.2 on the iPad or the newly announced iPhone OS 4. Given that Apple is tying iBooks so closely to the next OS release, chances are that iBooks for the iPhone won’t work on the original iPhone and older iPod touch models and won’t be available as a stand-alone download.
During a presentation on Apple’s Cupertino campus this morning, the company’s CEO, Steve Jobs, announced the next version of the iPhone operating system: iPhone OS 4. Apple will release a preview version to developers today and plans to release the OS to consumers in the summer. Among the new features in the OS are multitasking with the help of a new set of APIs. Developers will get access to over 1,500 new APIs, and users will see over 100 new features.
To run services in the background, as Apple’s SVP of iPhone software Scott Forstall noted, apps will have to access a new set of APIs. Music apps like Pandora will be able to stream their music 
Apple will now allow location services to run in the background. This will be a major boon for turn-by-turn direction services like Tom Tom and location-based social networks like Loopt, which Apple specifically mentioned during the event.
For gamers, Apple is introducing the Game Center, which is basically a social gaming network that will feature automatic matchmaking for multiplayer games, leaderboards and achievements.
Unsurprisngly, Apple also announced its new 
Swiss startup 
Kooaba, which specializes in image recognition and already offers similar recognition tools for book and CDs, is working directly with a number of magazine publishers in the German-speaking world. The company plans to bring its services to other countries as well. Sadly, the service doesn’t work for papers and magazines that don’t work directly with Kooaba to get their content featured on the app. Kooaba needs a PDF version of the magazine to train the service’s image recognition software.
According to the 
The current generation of check-in based location apps like Foursquare and Gowalla are more or less focused on the gaming aspects of location-based social networking. 
Just a few days after the
Push notifications were supposed to be a stop-gap measure until Apple opened up the floodgates for background applications. However, for breaking news updates, email alerts and Twitter notifications, these push alerts will still be useful (if only to maximize battery life). Right now, however, the iPhone OS doesn’t manage these notifications well. There is no way to see all recent notifications in one place and no way to just turn off notifications for certain hours of the day (and night) without having to turn them off altogether.
On April 1st, Google 
Yesterday, Jay Adelson
During the iPad 
Without a doubt, Pages for the iPad is one of the prettiest word processors we have ever used. The tabs and taskbar are clad in a faux leather look and just like its cousins on the desktop, the app puts a lot of emphasis on using images in your texts and making text flow nicely around them. 
Sadly, though, Pages does fall short in a number of aspects. While you can easily import and export documents (Pages and Word) by email or 
Thanks to a deal with Apple, books from 
Authors and publishers simply have to follow a straightforward set of 
Later today, Google will ask all 
Ever since Steve Jobs first 
It doesn’t come as a surprise that Apple managed to develop the prettier e-reader app. Switching from the iBooks store – which looks a lot like the App Store – to your bookshelf is done through a nifty animation. Newly downloaded books and samples smoothly slide into the bookshelf and thanks to a faux 3d look and a page-flip animation, the app itself mimics the look and feel of a book. When you click on a book in your shelf, it flips open and zoom to the page you left off. 
Amazon, of course, offers a far larger store than Apple. With close to 450,000 paid and free books. It’s worth noting that the Kindle store also launched with slightly more books (about 88,000). 
As with its other mobile apps, Amazon forces its readers to download apps from the Kindle online store. The only way to access this is through the browser. Here, Apple’s ability to integrate the store into the e-reader application is a big plus.
After a surprisingly short wait in line at our local Apple Store, where about 100 people lined up for their reserved iPads – and another 100 who didn’t have a reservations – we finally took possession of our very own Apple tablet. We will take a closer look at all the apps, hardware and iPad-optimized web sites over the course of the next few days, but here are our first impressions after spending some quality time with the iPad.
Without a doubt, the first thing you will notice is the sheer speed of the iPad. Web pages render very fast, switching from landscape to portrait mode only takes a second – even in image and video-heavy apps like the 
Apple uses the word “magical” whenever the company talks about the iPad. After using the iPad for a while, we can’t quite call it magical, but it’s definitely a huge step forward for personal computing. Being able to manipulate the web with your fingers directly on the screen, browsing through the New York Times or Popular Science app on the couch and checking up on your Twitter friends in the 
Apple wasn’t kidding when it said that the screen on the iPad would be gorgeous. It’s not just that the extra 
We haven’t had a chance to fully appreciate Apple’s own email, contacts, calendar apps, but our first impression is that they are all well designed, work as advertised and – thanks to making use of the bigger screen – are generally much easier to use on the iPad than on the iPhone. Safari, of course, is the highlight here, where web sites render just about as fast as on a notebook and browsing even non-mobile optimized sites feels perfectly natural (though, of course, without Flash some sites just don’t work very well). 
Google is definitely on a buying spree this year. The company’s 
There is also no API for third-party developers to hook into and integrate the URL shortener into their apps yet. Publishers, who often like to see detailed statistics about how their shortened URLs were used will also have to miss this feature if they use Nurph (unless, of course, they decide to shorten the Nurph link with another URL shortener). 
mostly based on the reputation of the developers and the screenshots that are available in the App Store.
Things is a great to-do list app with a focus on the Getting Things Done methodology. It’s a perennial favorite on the
Twitterific was an early favorite on the iPhone, though the latest version of Tweetie stole some of the Twitterific’s user base. Tweetie hasn’t made an appearance in the App Store yet, but Twitterific is already getting a lot of positive press and the screenshots in the App Store definitely make it look like the must-have Twitter app for the iPad