pnosker.com

Yesterday Pat brought you news that the ARDrone had been officially announced at E3.  If you didn't catch that article and want the full rundown on what the ARDrone is you can check out that article at http://www.pnosker.com/news/tech/222-parrot-ardrone-revealed-at-e3.  Otherwise, the Drone is, in brief, a quadricopter that can connect to ad-hoc wifi networks created from the iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch.  Luckily we were able to get our hands on one at this year's E3 and got a little bit hands on with this exciting new product.

There is no arguing the incredibleness of new smartphones.  The Apple iPhone is my favorite-- it features everything I need in a phone as well as a PDA in a small package.  Unfortunately, with more and more features packed into a tiny package, it's difficult to make a really great "phone" feature within the smartphone.  Compared to several other phones I have owned in the past, including many Nokias especially, my signal strength is just terrible.  In locations where I used to get full service, I may only have two bars with the iPhone.  This is especially critical with my iPhone since it's jailbroken and runs on T-Mobile.  Unlike AT&T's 850 mhz band, T-Mobile's 1900 mhz band has a much smaller footprint per tower due to the laws of physics.  There are places in my town where I have absolutely NO service at all.

A few years ago I was tired of myself getting the cheapest, least featured GPS units and finally splurged for a Tom Tom GPS with bluetooth, text to speech, and a bunch of other features as a "premium" model.  I was quite happy for a while-- I could pair my iPhone to it and actually hear a conversation, it would calculate routes over twice as fast as my previous Magellan, and was overall a great GPS.  Unfortunately, living in a small city of 50,000 or so, there are neighborhoods that have higher crime than others.  Because of the black plastic disk that came with the GPS to put a dashboard, my car was broken into, costing me both $500 to repair the door and window as well as my $200 GPS.  It was then that I decided I was no longer going to use a portable GPS.