Air-Bag Containing Seatbelt Coming to Luxury Cars

Next year, buyers of the Lexus LFA sports-car will be even safer, thanks to a new kind of seatbelt designed by Takata Corp. The belt looks like any other, but contains an airbag that will inflate in case of a crash.

The belt is called the AirBelt, and will find its way into Toyota’s car under the much more boring name of “SRS Seat Belt Airbag”. The belt contains a bag inside its webbing, which is fired on impact by a gas-canister down by the buckle. The resulting bag protects the head and shoulder from side-on crashes, and also gets between the head and shoulder to stop sideways whiplash injuries.

This is the first time the tech will be seen in a passenger car, and adds one more life-saving feature to these rolling death-boxes. As someone who is justifiably terrified of car-travel, I think cars should be made more scary, not less. If these tin-cans let in the road noise and did away with all distractions (stereos and anything else with a button, cup-holders), then people might actually realize just how dangerous their cars are and maybe pay some attention to the road ahead.

Takata First to Commercialize Safety “Airbelt” for Passenger Cars (PDF) [Takata]

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Flash on iPhone, But Not the One You Think

The iFlash not a battery-sucking, CPU-choking browser plugin. Instead, it’s an LED lamp that plugs into the dock-connector of any iPhone or iPod and provides a “flash” for your photos.

It’s self-powered, so you won’t drain your battery, and you’ll have to switch it on and off manually, making the dock-connector little more than a mounting point for the light. And that’s not the only hole it will fill on the iPhone: a little plastic jack-plug will let you dangle the dongle from the iPhone’s headphone socket when not in use.

I’d probably avoid this particular gadget, though. If you’re going to add light to your photos, why go to all the bother of buying an expensive light and then just stick the thing right near the lens, where it will give you the same harsh shadows you get from any light so close to the lens. It’s like buying an SB900 strobe for your Nikon and then sitting it in the camera’s hot-shoe. No, better to just take the $40 this widget will cost you and buy a decent LED flashlight.

iFlash Product Page [Gadgets and Gear via Oh Gizmo]

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Canon Will Replace Your Slippery Knob for $100

A rather strange piece of news comes to us from Canon. If you have either the EOS 7D or 5D Mark II, you can send it off to Canon and get a brand new mode-dial. Why? Because this one locks in place, requiring you to push a central button to turn it.

Presumably Canon has received enough complaints from users that it deems this a worthwhile upgrade. I have used both cameras briefly and never thought that the mode-dial was particularly loose. Perhaps that’s something that worsens with time?

Even odder is that this upgrade will cost you $100, which seems steep for something that Canon seems to see as a fix for a design flaw. So if you’re the kind of person who can’t glance down to check what mode your camera is in, and if you don’t mind being without your SLR for what will presumably be a few weeks, then go ahead. Canon will be happy to have some of your money.

Slippery Knob upgrade page [Canon]

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Hard Drive Dock Marred by Stupid Novelty Design

As a novelty USB gadget, the Slipper from Brando is a horrible, pointless piece of plastic. Shaped like a flip-flop with shiny red toes peeking out, the Hornettek Slipper would be more at home in the dime store than on any self-respecting geek’s Christmas list.

But ignore those stupid toes, if you can, and the Slipper becomes something you do actually want: a dock for all the raw hard drives you have tucked away under the bed next to your real slippers. Slip in any 2.5 or 3-inch SATA drive and hook it up via speedy USB 3. Backup is made easy with a dedicated switch (if you have the software installed, and are also running Windows), and those annoying toes (sorry, I can’t ignore them) are in fact an eject-lever: pull it and the drive pops out.

Useful, right? And at $45 it’ll probably actually save you money because you won’t have to buy enclosed backup drives. Available now.

Slipper product page [Brando]

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Levitation Station Charges Phone as it Floats

Charging cables, and even charging pads, are so last year. What you really want is a way to make your phone float while it re-juices its batteries, and that’s exactly what In-Oh Yoo and Sun-woong Oh want to give you. Their (concept) combo phone and charging-station use magnets to keep the phone floating, and use magic (or some other unspecified tech) to fill the battery.

So far, so boring – it’s not much more than a Sky Mall executive toy, right? Things get interesting when the phone rings (or an alarm goes off):the handset starts to spin, and the after-image effect creates a 3D illusion showing the caller ID.

Annoyingly, the designers saw fit to make the charger glow at night, a “feature” that serves only to annoy you as you try to get to sleep. But otherwise this is pretty damn cool. If you’re going to have a charging station, why not have one which levitates your phone?

This Phone Hovers in Space [Yanko. Thanks, Radhika!]

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How a 1970s-Era Flight Data Recorder Worked

Today’s airplane “black boxes” are mostly solid state, recording critical flight data in semiconductor memory.

But before the days of cheap, durable flash memory, and even before magnetic tape, here’s how a flight data recorder worked: By scribing lines in a long sheet of inconel steel foil: A metal hard enough and corrosion-resistant enough to withstand even the most extreme environmental catastrophes: up to 3,000 Gs and up to 1,000 degrees Celsius.

They were a marvel of super-durable, mostly-mechanical engineering.

Bill Hammond, the “Engineer Guy,” explains just how that worked in this accessible two-minute video.

And if you want a flight data recorder of your own, you can buy one for about $125 on eBay.

Engineer Guy Video (via The Atlantic)

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Parrot’s RC Aircraft Looks Amazing, Inside and Out

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Parrot’s AR.Drone looks like any other four-bladed, foam*-framed remote-control quadricopter. But inside it’s packed to the gills with electronics that make it far more sophisticated than most.

“The AR. Drone is earth-shattering,” gushes iFixit, which disassembled the drone after testing it. “It has blown away every drone expert we’ve talked to. It’s not just a toy: it’s a phenomenal piece of engineering that manages to solve some very difficult software problems in order to take flight.”

Start with the controller: Instead of using a pair of joysticks, the AR.Drone utilizes an iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad app, which optionally lets you steer the drone via its onboard VGA camera. It’s a bit like you were a tiny little homunculus, sitting inside the drone, peering out at the world through its wide-angle lens.

Inside, the drone’s circuit boards sport a 16-bit microprocessor, an ARM CPU, Wi-Fi module, memory, and a gyroscope. It also has an ultrasound altimeter that helps the drone stay stable up to 6 meters above ground. The four brushless motors propel the rotors in opposite directions (two go clockwise, two go counter-clockwise) at up to 41,400 RM.

Its 1,000 mAh battery will last for about 10 minutes. That’s more than enough time to play virtual reality games, zip around the house terrorizing your siblings, or take a quick aerial recon flight above your house.

We saw a demo of the Parrot AR.Drone at CES (video link), and we’re happy to see it’s now on the market. It’ll cost you, though: One drone is $300. And you’ll need two (plus two iPhones) if you want to play the augmented-reality first-person shooter shown in the video below.

* technically it’s expanded polypropylene (EPP).

Photos courtesy iFixit.

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Will iPad Knock Out Kindle? Numbers Aren’t Pretty for Amazon


About a year ago, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said he believed general-purpose gadgets were the future, and dedicated devices such as the Kindle were on their way out. Early numbers suggest he may be right.

A survey by market research firm ChangeWave indicates that the iPad is rapidly catching up to the Kindle in the e-book reader market.

Of 2,800 respondents who took ChangeWave’s survey, 32 percent said they used an iPad as an e-reader, while 47 percent said they used a Kindle.

ChangeWave also polled future e-reader buyers planning to buy readers in the next 30 days, and 42 percent said they were likely to buy an iPad, while 33 percent said they’d probably buy a Kindle.

That shows fast growth for the iPad in the e-reader market, especially when you consider the iPad launched in April, while the Kindle has been around since 2007.

But that’s not necessarily a bad thing for Amazon (yet). Amazon offers a free Kindle app for the iPhone and iPad to download Amazon e-books. Because of that move, Amazon saw a surge in e-book sales, according to research firm Cowen. The firm estimated in an October report that Kindle e-book book sales via the Kindle e-book store were on track to grow 195 percent to $701 million this year.

“iPad is not having a negative impact on Kindle device or e-book sales,” according to the report, written by Cowen analysts Jim Friedland and Kevin Kopelman. “In fact, we think the adoption of tablets will boost Kindle e-book sales.”

However, iPad customers are, of course, downloading apps through the iBooks store more than on the Kindle store: 60 percent of people reading books on the iPad say they use iBooks most often, and 31 percent they use the Kindle app most often, according to the Cowen report.

So if iPad sales outpace the Kindle e-readers, as the ChangeWave survey suggests, Apple could eventually take a sizable chunk of e-book sales away from Amazon. Credit Suisse analyst Spencer Wang predicted earlier this year that Amazon’s share of the e-book market will shrink from 90 percent to 35 percent by 2015, according to AllThingsD.

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Photo: Bryan Derballa/Wired.com

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Dell Launches Windows Phone 7-Powered Venue Pro

Dell on Wednesday announced its first handset running Microsoft’s new mobile operating system Windows Phone 7, the Venue Pro.

Available for T-Mobile subscribers, the Venue Pro features a 4.1-inch AMOLED touchscreen, a 5-megapixel camera and a vertical slide-out QWERTY keyboard.

Inside, the Venue Pro includes a Snapdragon processor, 512 MB of RAM, 1 GB of flash storage, 802.11 b/g wireless, a capacitive touchscreen and five sensors (A-GPS, accelerometer, compass, proximity and light).

Computer-maker Dell entered the smartphone business in 2009 with the Mini 3, which has since been renamed the Aero.

Though today marks the Venue Pro’s official launch day, Dell already began shipping small handfuls of this device to some Microsoft stores last month. That head start didn’t work so well, as some customers who bought the device reported Wi-Fi bugs and mislabeled batteries. Dell confirmed these early issues and said they were addressed.

The phone starts at $100 with an 8-GB data contract. It begins shipping Dec. 9.

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Image courtesy of Dell

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Hands-On with the ZooGue Genius iPad Case

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ZooGue’s leather folio-style case for the iPad is called the Genius. That’s some fancy talking right there, but amazingly it actually manages to live up to the name. Almost. A slightly more accurate name would be Fat Genius.

Let’s get the problem out of the way first. The Genius might be incredibly handy, but it is also thick and heavy, thanks mostly to the profusion of clever extras. Empty, it weighs 16-ounces, or around two-thirds the wight of the iPad itself. It is also fat, looking less like you have slipped the iPad into a case and more like you have tucked it up in bed: The case is all but a full inch thick. All that material does help protect the iPad inside, though.

The Genius might be bulky, but the features it packs in almost make up for it. First, slot the tablet in. It works like the Apple case, with the iPad entering through a slot by the hinge. A flap then wraps around and Velcros into place, and all ports and switches are left clear. Flip the case open and the stiff front-cover sits around back, out of the way.

This cover has a pair of ugly Velcro strips along the top and bottom edges (along with a nasty plastic logo-badge, apparently shrunken from an earlier version). These strips engage with a Velcro-tipped kickstand on the back, letting you prop the iPad at any angle from around 35-degrees to vertical. This is the best part of the case: adjustment is fast and easy, and the stand is as sturdy as you could wish for. It is also very comfortable for reading, with the iPad either on your lap or on your chest (if you’re lying down).

The other gimmick is a strap that wraps around a car-headrest to keep the kids entertained. The strap is elasticated, and in two parts. Wrap both sides around the headrest and they Velcro together. It works well, and the straps can also be used to keep the case closed.

The leather is plush, but slippery. Prop this against a wall and it may slip and fall flat, unlike the grippy Apple case (still my favorite of every case I have tried).

If you don’t mind its size, then the Genius should be on your list: It’s well made and easy to use, and for what you get, pretty cheap at $50. If you’re looking for something simple and slim, move along.

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