Every other year, aviation fanatics gather in the city of baguettes and burlesque to order airplanes, gawk at concept vehicles, and dream about a better future. The D-Dalus, one of the more bizarre concepts at this year’s Paris Air Show, from Austrian research company IAT21, stays aloft using quad contra-rotating cylindrical turbines — and perhaps a touch of magic. Theoretically creating a completely new category of aircraft, the carbon fiber D-Dalus maneuvers by altering the angle of its blades, giving it virtually limitless abilities to launch, hover, and turn in any direction. An aircraft with this level of flexibility is more suited for military use than consumer applications (you won’t be flying home from Paris in a freakish black tube), but could become a key asset for everything from freight transport to search and rescue operations — on land, at sea, or even in a burning building. We haven’t come across any proof that the Dalus can actually fly, but hit up the source link to see the craft suspended from the show floor ceiling in Paris.

D-Dalus aircraft lacks fixed-wing or rotor, looks like flying steamroller originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 23 Jun 2011 19:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Remember that whole porn crackdown that nobody cares about anymore? Wonder why it happened?

It wasn’t the money. It wasn’t hypocritical. It wasn’t about defending the rights of women to browse the app store unflustered. It was about image. Here’s Gruber’s cogent and true argument:

I think what Apple was getting squeamish about wasn’t the sexy apps themselves, but the cheesiness that the sexy apps (and their prominence in best selling lists) was bestowing upon the general feel and vibe of the App Store. One thing I wasn’t aware of before the recent crackdown was the degree to which these apps were seeping into various non-entertainment categories. E.g., like half the “new” apps in the “productivity” category featured imagery of large-breasted bikini-clad women.

These apps were shut down temporarily. They will be back, and the ban wasn’t about not offending our sainted mothers. It was about making a retail experience that people want to visit and, like Chef Ramsay shutting down Casa Roma rather than serve the rest of the night’s meals in a haphazard, sloppy way, Apple decided to shut things down and make their decisions. This, in turn, forces Apple management to make a decision.

Think about it: sex sells and what percolates to the top of the App Store? Sex. When you buy an iPhone and open the App Store, you don’t see quality content for quality people. You see “Boob Dancer” and “Sassy Bikini Girl 2.0.” If this is your first experience with the App Store, you’re going to be put off. Quality, or at lease perceived quality, goes down.

I think the boob apps will return under a new category that will be almost completely inaccessible until unlocked by a sentient adult. This, in turn, will reduce the number of boob apps visible to the average user.

Think about your own App Store experience. I’m fairly sure you didn’t buy “Bikini Personal Information Manager 1.0″ when you first bought your iPhone. You probably bought iShoot or downloaded Yelp or rocked out with some Tap Tap Revolution. I think the vast majority of users follow this same path. The boob apps are for the febrile mind and downloaded more for yuks than out of actual interest.

In the end, those poor, sad-faced app designers will get a new category and they’ll be able to sell their garbage again. Heck, some dumb app called Wobble which essentially lets you make people’s boobs wobble is back in the App Store. This is Apple’s world. We just live in it.

Themes are a new category in BlackBerry App World, with about 150 free and premium themes available to download at launch.

The Averatec N3400 is an ultraportable notebook with a 13-inch screen, “aluminum-clad” shell, external DVD burner, and 3.8-pound body weight. Priced at $799, it’s got a lot to offer.

That price actually hovers around the relatively new category of ultra low-voltage machines, which aim to offer the long battery life and portability of netbooks with a little more power, bigger screens, and bigger keyboards.

Specs:

Averatec’s offering, however, is not a low-voltage notebook, although it might be able to get away with playing one on TV if the role called for it since it’s only an inch thick. Under the hood, there’s a full blown 35-watt dual-core Pentium T3400 CPU clocked at 2.16GHz – a far cry from the sub-10-watt CPUs found in netbooks and ultra low-voltage machines.

Other features include Windows Home Vista Premium, 3GB of RAM, 250GB hard drive, external DVD burner, and a six-cell battery. The screen is 13.3 inches and has a 1280×800 resolution.

First Impressions:

You know what’s weird? I can’t quite explain it, but the notebook feels heavy even though it’s only 3.8 pounds. I weighed, weighed it, and weighed it again and every time: 3.8 pounds.

My wife carries around a 5+ pound MacBook all day and when I had her pick up the Averatec, sure enough, she remarked that it felt heavier than it looked. And she couldn’t believe it was almost two pounds lighter than her MacBook. I pulled this same trick with every subsequent guest we had over in the ensuing weeks and they all echoed the same sentiments.

I can’t figure it out. The thing just looks and feels bigger than it ought to for some reason. But, again, it is indeed 3.8 pounds.

As for the body style, the brushed aluminum outer shell looks and feels really nice. Very classy, especially for $800. Once you open the thing up, you’ve got a traditional plasticky notebook, though – much more in line with an $800 price tag. There’s a big half-inch plastic bezel around the entire screen which I feel detracts from the overall style.

Performance:

Thanks to the ample RAM and the quick processor, the N3400 hums along quite nicely. I tested it with both the included version of Windows Vista Home Premium and then did a clean install of the Windows 7 Release Candidate since the machine comes with a free upgrade to Windows 7 that you can cash in on October 22nd. Vista felt snappy, Windows 7 felt snappier.

The Windows Experience Index under Windows 7 returned the following scores:

• Processor: 5.3
• Memory: 5.3
• Graphics: 3.6
• Gaming Graphics: 4.9
• Disk Data Transfer Rate: 5.1

So, a total score of 3.6 since Windows bases the overall score on the lowest subscore. Being that all the other scores are close to or above 5, though, you’ll see some decent power.

The Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics chip only shares up to 128MB of RAM, so you’re not going to be doing any serious gaming but it works fine for casual stuff. The machine handled every single type of video file I threw at it, including HD flash video in full screen, which is notoriously fickle, and various other HD video files all the way up to 1080p resolution even though there isn’t much point in going past 720p since the screen tops out at 1280×800.

As for battery life, it’s not great. You’ll get between 2 and 3 hours depending upon what you’re doing. Whenever I’d really tax the system with a bunch of auto-refreshing web pages and multiple open programs, I wouldn’t even get two hours. So don’t buy it thinking that you’ll be able to leave the AC adapter at home all day.

The trackpad is… um… interesting. You have eight icons surrounding the outside edges which can be activated to control stuff like opening your e-mail, media playback, and various assignable hotkeys. You use the trackpad like you normally would and then when you want to use these shortcut buttons, you tap the button in the upper right-hand corner once.

The problem is that when you use the trackpad to scroll vertically by sliding your finger down the right-hand side, it’s far too easy to accidentally activate the hotkeys. So you’ll be surfing a web page and then all of a sudden all these random programs will start popping open.

Good in theory (?), not good in practice. I turned that feature off in the Control Panel.

Other than that, the trackpad works just fine. There’s a single bar for the left and right mouse buttons which may otherwise turn people off, but only the far corners push downward so I never had problems with accidental button presses.

The keyboard is pretty good, too – ample surface area, nice springy keys, good layout. Nothing extraordinary but it certainly didn’t get in the way. I was able to type up a bunch of posts and e-mails without any problems whatsoever.

I ran into a really annoying problem with the Intel 5100AGN wireless card installed in this laptop: it’d just disconnect randomly from my wireless network. I searched around and noticed that a fair number of people were experiencing the same issues but I was able to get everything working correctly by using the actual Intel drivers instead of the drivers being used by Windows. I had the same problems in Vista and Windows 7, both of which were fixed by using the actual Intel software.

As for the screen, it’s decent though unspectacular. The 1280×800 resolution makes everything look nice and big and the screen gets relatively bright without washing out. It’s just like the rest of the machine – everything’s “pretty good” but not necessarily awesome. That’s actually a compliment considering that it costs $800 and is only an inch thick. There aren’t nearly as many compromises as you’d expect – the battery life is really the only big one.

Conclusion:

The Averatec N3400 is a solid machine at a decent price. It looks nicer on the outside than most other $800 laptops and the 3.8-pound travel weight makes it easy to tote around (even if it mysteriously feels heavier than that somehow). Battery life leaves a bit to be desired, but what it lacks in longevity it makes up for in processing power.

All in all, not bad for $800 especially if you’re looking for something to potentially use as a primary computer but that won’t weigh you down when you’re on the go.

Averatec N3400 [ShopAveratec.com]

Everybody’s making noise about the upcoming Apple tablet, and who can blame them? It’ll certainly be an interesting device, but the thing is that nobody really knows what it’s going to be. Flat, to be sure, and tablet-shaped in all likelihood, but beyond that it’s pretty much anybody’s guess. Analyst-at-large Gene Munster has made a list of predictions anyway, since his job is to turn ignorance into money.

So what does he think you can expect? Sales, for one thing. Via a house-of-cards sort of logic peculiar to analysts like himself, he first determines the features, then the price, then the sales, then the revenue. Here are his nested prognostications, as summarized by Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech.

• Be similar to an iPod touch, only larger, capable of running most of the 70,000 applications on the iPhone App Store plus a new category of apps designed for the bigger screen.
• Will be used primarily for Web surfing, e-mail, and digital media, competing with netbooks without being a netbook.
• Will be priced between an iPhone and a MacBook — between $500 and $700.
• Is likely to include a 3G cellular modem and could be subsidized by a carrier — either AT&T (T) or Verizon (VZ).
• Will sell better than Apple TV did its first year (1.2 million units).
• Could in fact sell 2 million units at $600 each to generate $1.2 billion and add about 3% to Apple’s revenue stream in calendar 2010.

Now, I’m not saying he’s wrong on all these points (though, as Boing Boing Gadgets points out, his track record isn’t inspiring); in fact, they’re more or less in line with my own predictions. I’d submit, though, that the App Store thing is troubling. You’d expect some info would have leaked by now regarding how to program or adapt your apps for this thing. Since nothing has come out, it is implied that the tablet runs either iPhone apps or OS X apps natively (or both). I don’t think that’s likely, or even a good idea. After all, every app in the store is configured for an iPhone’s hardware. Innumerable compatibility problems could arise.

Most troubling of all is the fact that the iPhone’s screen is a mere 320×480; if the Apple tablet is at 1280×720 (my guess), it’s beyond the power of resizing and filtering to make these apps full screen or even reasonably large (not to mention the aspect ratio difference). And I doubt Apple would be satisfied with ugly little app “widgets” clogging up what will almost certainly be a serene and controlled user interface. I don’t have a solution for this, I might add… not my job. I’m hoping Apple does.

And as for the somewhat arbitrary prediction that Apple will sell 2 million units, I find it unconvincing. We heard from a previous analyst (who has actually seen the device, or so he claims) that all the other companies are just waiting for Apple to go so they can undercut and offer the same services. I think that unlike the full OS X (which I don’t think the tablet will run) or the iPhone’s OS (ditto), this tablet’s OS will offer fewer chances to innovate, though I have faith that Apple will throw a few curveballs in there, likely to do with elegantly implemented gestures. Still, 2 million units is a lot to ask for a completely new type of platform, in an economy when an entirely new price point below this one (and offering more functionality) has risen to prominence.

If I had to weigh in (and I don’t really), I’d say that it’s going to be a success, but will fill the same role in the upcoming tablet wars as the Mac fills in the PC wars: a luxury option. Perhaps in a year or two, we’ll be hearing how Apple sold 90% of the tablets costing over $700, but I don’t think it’s too far out to think that competitors like Asus, Dell, and our own CrunchPad will be doing a lot of selling too — higher volumes at lower price points, yes, but I think that’s appropriate for a tablet. We’ll have more on the phantom tablet as it develops, but feel free to make your own predictions.

HP announced the Mini 5101 back in late June and we just got one into the ‘Gear office for review. As John noted back when it was announced, the 5101 isn’t a netbook and it’s fallen into the relatively new category of ultralights. I really liked the Mini 1000 and 2140, but the 5101 might be my new favorite.

Here’s a quick rundown of the specs for the review unit we were sent:

• Windows XP
• 1.66GHz Intel Atom N280 processor (512KB L2 cache, 533MHz FSB)
• 1GB of RAM
• 160GB HDD
• 10.1-inch LED WSVGA
• 6-cell battery

HP tells me this particular setup runs about $425 with the 6-cell battery, but I haven’t been able to replicate it on the HP site.

First Impressions

The all black magnesium and brushed aluminum shell is gorgeous. However, it appears to be prone to smudges so you’ll want to keep a cloth handy to wipe it down. The (almost) full sized keyboard is leaps and bounds better than the Mini 1000 or 2140. I love the keyboard. Love it. I dislike the trackpad at the moment. It’s a bit too sticky for my tastes, but better than other HP laptops that I’ve had in the past. Two quick launch buttons (Internet, E-mail) are located near the power button, which is now located above the keyboard.

So far, so good. The 5101 ultralight is a gorgeous little laptop. It’s lightweight despite the 6-cell battery and HP really nailed it in the looks department with this one. We’ll have a full review in a week or so.