Posted: 05 Dec 2010 01:36 PM PST

So a fellow named Josh Wiseman today tells of a mighty change that’ll be occurring on your Facebook profile soon. Included in this change are several updates including A New Introduction, Featured Friends, New Experiences, and Improved Photos and Friends Pages. This entire setup will be rolling out gradually, Facebook’s Wiseman says, getting to everyone by early next year, or you can opt to upgrade immediately if you wish.

This new profile first has “A New Introduction” with includes location, school, work, and a row of photos right up at the top of your profile where you want them, (especially if they’re totally embarrassing and you havn’t had a chance to de-tag them yet.) Next, there’s “Featured Friends”, recalling nightmares of MySpace, this feature isn’t quite so bad as that ol’ beast, highlighting the friends you want and allowing you to create groups of friends at your leisure.

The first of two bigger changes is “New Experiences” which gives you a new way to share you activities and interests. List your favorites just like you used to do before social networking existed! Each of your interests and experiences have their own representative image. One option for this is the ability to create a group of people you’ve gone to or go to school with, tagging the people that go in that group, this feature then displaying updates from only them.

The next bigger addition is in “Improved Photos and Friends Pages,” these additions beginning with an “infinite scroll” feature which allows you to cycle through photos in a way new to Facebook. Your friends page, on the other hand, now allows you to more easily search for friends by name, hometown, school, phone number, and more. Get the new profile NOW by clicking over on [Facebook Profile]

SlashGear Week in Review – Week 48 2010

Posted: 05 Dec 2010 07:19 AM PST

Welcome to the latest edition of the SlashGear Week in Review! Apple rejected an app for inclusion on the App Store this week because it was a magazine app about Android. The publisher of the app said that the person at Apple he spoke with said, “You know… your magazine. It's just about Android…. we can't have that in our App Store.” A report came in early in the week that Windows Phone 7 was outsold by Android devices 15:1 in the UK. The revelation came by way of an aggregator of store deals in the UK called MobilesPlease.

A sweet new Tron flash drive surfaced that is in the shape of a Lightcycle. The thing glows when you plug it into the USB port of your computer and there are styles that look like the bikes from the old flick and the new one. A woman has claimed ownership of the sun and had the document notarized. The woman even wants to charge for use of the sun apparently, what a moron.

The new Tegra 2 smartphone from LG called the Star was leaked this week and the thing is said to be a benchmarking demon. The device runs Android and is going to be one of the first Tegra 2 smartphones to hit the market. Microsoft has announced that it sold 2.5 million Kinect devices in the first 25 days the thing has been on the market. That is a lot of folks that are playing and hacking the cool accessory.

Verizon offered up details on the roll out of its long anticipated LTE network. The details were offered at an event that was held on December 1. NASA offered up a very cryptic press release on Tuesday that hinted at a major discovery in astrobiology. The event was packed with scientists that specialize in organisms that live in high concentrations of arsenic.

Samsung Mobile Display was showed off a new type of screen tech this week called Super PLS. The new screen is brighter and has better viewing angles than IPS screens while being cheaper to make. A rumor surfaced mid-week that claims Microsoft is working on a new HD remake of Halo: Combat Evolved. The title is rumored to be in development at 343 Industries where future Halo titles will be made. However, Microsoft said that it plans to work on supporting Halo: Reach right now with no new title to announce.

If you recall a few months back the real replicas of the Tron Lightcycles surfaced on eBay that were street legal. Those bikes didn't all sell and if you wanted one you can still get one for a cool $55k and you can now see a video of the makers riding the thing. SuperTalent tossed a new flash drive on the market this week using USB 3.0 and having Creedo Personal installed. The drive lets the user run any software they want in a secure environment.

A patent app from Apple surfaced outlining a new 3D display tech that needs no glasses. Not only does the patent app show a screen needing no glasses, but it needs no parallax tech either. NASA offered more details on Thursday on that press release about a new discovery. NASA has found microbes on Earth that can live in high concentrations of arsenic making it much more likely to find other life in the universe.

Angry Birds Seasons expansion landed on the App Store this week. The game has the Halloween and the Christmas version of the game and upgrades to the app will be free. Google has agreed to pay $1 in compensation to a couple who sued them for violations of privacy with Street View. The attorney for the couple said the buck is “one sweet dollar of vindication.”

The geeks at iFixit took the Parrot AR.Drone iPhone controlled flying device and tore the thing apart for use to look at. I still think that the AR.Drone is one of the coolest accessories for the iPhone. We posted up our review of the Sony Ericsson LiveView display Friday. The thing promised a lot and wasn’t that great ultimately with lots of connectivity issues.

A cool new bar of soap that glows in the dark surfaced late in the week. The little bar of soap has the periodic table markings for Uranium on it. A professor of photography in New York had a camera installed in on the back if his head at a piercing shop and it takes a picture every minute and sends the pics to a photography exhibit called “The 3rd Eye.”

The prosecution in the Xbox 360 modder case has dropped the charges against Matthew Crippen. Crippen faced ten years in prison if he was convicted, but as it turns out the key video evidence in the case was obtained illegally. Congress passed the CALM Act this week and the act is on its way to Obama’s desk to be signed into law. The CALM Act will force commercial makers to set the volume for the commercials to the same level as the show you are watching.

Google is set to have a Chrome event on December 7. The event will be in San Francisco and will be broadcast on YouTube as well. It will be next Tuesday at 10:30 so check it out. Thanks for reading this week’s edition of the SlashGear Week in Review!

Parrot AR.Drone Review

Posted: 04 Dec 2010 10:15 PM PST

Parrot’s AR.Drone was the surprise hit of CES 2010, breaking the French company out of its Bluetooth prison and instead taking to the skies with an iPhone-controlled quadricopter. Reminiscent of something out of a William Gibson novel, the AR.Drone promises to best all R/C helicopters before it, with its combination of four-rotor stability and onboard autopilot intelligence. Check out the full SlashGear review after the cut.

Hardware

While remote-control helicopters have long been using dual, contra-rotating blades for increased stability and easier amateur piloting, the AR.Drone goes even better and doubles that to a full four rotors. They’re set on short arms around a black polystyrene hub, into which slots the battery pack. Unlike with many “toy” ‘copters, Parrot expects the AR.Drone to be used indoors and out, and provides not only a colorful top chassis but also a removable four-hoop bumper. Indoors, the bumper reduces the likelihood of rotors snapping when you inevitably hit the walls, ceiling and floor; outdoors, the AR.Drone is faster, more maneuverable and more wind-resilient with the bumper taken off.

Inside the AR.Drone there are the same sort of sensors, radios and cameras, as you’d find in a modern smartphone, only here they’re all working together to keep the quadricopter airborne. As well as gyroscopes, ultrasound sensors and the like, to keep the ‘copter level, Parrot’s engineers have used twin cameras to track height and position. One camera points ahead, beaming back a live stream to whichever iOS device you’re using to control the AR.Drone, while a second looks down at the ground and is used to monitor speed. Together, they’re good enough to keep the AR.Drone hovering stable at a preset height – you can even nudge it with your hand and it will re-steady itself – which means that should you lose controller connection or generally screw up your piloting duties, the Parrot can righten itself automatically.

The final key ingredient is WiFi, which Parrot use to hook up your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad with the AR.Drone itself. Rather than rely on a third-party router – generally in short supply when you’re in a park – the AR.Drone creates its own WiFi network to which the iOS app connects (though you have to set up the WiFi permissions in iOS’ own Settings pages). Range is a quoted 160 feet – less if there are walls in-between, naturally – and if the AR.Drone does get away from you it’ll automatically land when it spots the connection has dropped.

Parrot’s choice of plastics, foams and other materials are suitably rugged, and despite repeated crashes as we gradually earned our pilot’s stripes we never managed to put more than a minor dent into the chassis. Happily Parrot also make various spares available (for instance, an indoor hull is $30 while an outdoor hull is $20), so if you do manage to snap a rotor you needn’t buy a whole new AR.Drone to replace it. As for safety, the blades automatically stop as soon as they encounter any resistance: we jammed a sacrificial SlashGear finger in their way, and escaped scratch-free.

Software

No small amount of the AR.Drone’s appeal is its method of control, with Parrot bypassing plasticky remotes and instead heading straight for Apple’s App Store. The free software turns an iPhone, iPod touch or iPad into a touchscreen controller, with simple on-screen buttons, a live video feed from either of the two cameras, and accelerometer-led flying.

Piloting the AR.Drone requires a combination of screen taps and device movement: physically tilting the iPhone moves the quadricopter forward, back, left and right, while the right thumb controls altitude and rotation with an on-screen joystick. Parrot has sensibly offered two modes, depending on pilot aptitude: the “beginner” mode is less responsive to sudden movements but more forgiving of novice users, while the “ace” mode tightens up the responsiveness if you have the skill level to match. Take your left thumb off the screen and the ‘copter automatically hovers.

Colored LEDs on the AR.Drone itself help you figure out its orientation, useful considering it can be otherwise tricky to differentiate which is the front; alternatively you can be brave and attempt to navigate solely from the video feed. This is a reasonably tricky prospect, however, what with the 15fps refresh rate – which Parrot claims is a limitation of the WiFi connection and 640 x 480 resolution – though it does mean you can control the AR.Drone from a completely different room. Unfortunately there’s no way to record the streaming video, so you can’t, say, strafe your family and then upload the havoc to YouTube. Screenshots via the usual home/power-button iOS combo do work, however. The bottom camera runs at just 176 x 144, but streams at 60fps.

The other notable controls are the auto-land and emergency buttons; the functionality of each is pretty obvious. Auto-land causes the AR.Drone to ease its way to the ground and then kill the rotors; the emergency button, meanwhile, cuts power instantly. Signal strength and power are shown as gauges in the top left and right hand corners, respectively, while the setting pages allow you to tweak responsiveness and re-calibrate the auto-leveling.

While users are expected to get no small amount of enjoyment with a single AR.Drone, Parrot is also hoping that owners will get together and play games with more than one unit. The “AR” in the name stands for “augmented reality”, which basically involves running games on the iPhone or iPod touch that overlay graphics onto the view from the AR.Drone’s camera. So, with two units you can hold in-air dogfights, trying to line up and blast your opponent on-screen. Each quadricopter identifies the other using the different colored stickers included in the box, and you can have three sets of colors in play at any one time.

Parrot is promising more apps that take advantage of the augmented reality aspect of the AR.Drone – they launched another earlier this month – but their real ambition is to get third-party developers involved. There’s an open SDK available, though so far we’re yet to see any significant results from it; it may well be a case of coders waiting for the AR.Drone to pick up in sales popularity before they dive in.

As for non-iOS devices, right now there’s no way to get involved: the AR.Drone is Apple-only. Back at CES in January 2010 there was talk of an Android version of the controller software, but that’s so far failed to materialize. Still, Parrot claims to be adding the communication source code to their development platform, so it’s possible a third-party developer could come up with an Android app.

AR.Drone taking flight

Performance

Parrot’s control system takes a little getting used to, as does figuring out which way the AR.Drone is facing, but after a short acclimatization period it’s clear this is one of the most easily piloted R/C ‘copters we’ve tested. It certainly benefits from having plenty of space, however; the manufacturer recommends 12 x 12 feet for indoor flight. More enclosed spaces can lead to the autopilot system being overwhelmed by air from the rotors buffeting against walls.

Outdoors and that concern is gone, though then you have wind to contend with. The AR.Drone can withstand a moderate wind, but anything above around 7MPH is considered no-go by Parrot, and considering watching $300 worth of quadricopter blown away into the distance will have an unpleasant impact on your wallet, we tend to agree.

The biggest frustration – like with all remote control vehicles – is battery life. Parrot estimate an average flight time of 12 minutes from a full charge, with the battery taking 90 minutes to rejuice. Unfortunately there’s only a single power pack in the box, though Parrot will sell you spares at $30 each. In practical terms, we found we were unlikely to fly the AR.Drone solidly, and so the amount of use from a single battery was longer – or at least felt that way – than the stated time. The ‘copter also varies in its power demands depending on how you’re using it: leave it hovering on autopilot, for instance, and it’ll last longer than if you’re actively flying it.

Still, it’s the biggest stumbling block the AR.Drone faces, and it puts a dampener on the user experience overall. Parrot could have easily gone some way to addressing this by bundling a second battery, which seems a miserly omission.

Wrap-Up

Although Parrot’s augmented reality dogfight ideas certainly have merit, they’re not the winning feature of the AR.Drone. The units themselves are simply too expensive – and thus rare – to make it likely you’ll come across another owner, which means you either need to double your outlay and buy two AR.Drones or content yourself with solo flight. Hopefully third-party developers will bring out games that allow a single user to take advantage of AR gameplay.

Instead, the AR.Drone stands out as the most consumer-ready R/C device we’ve played with, comfortably ahead of regular – albeit generally cheaper – toy helicopters. Though we wouldn’t argue with longer runtime or smoother video, they’re both limitations it would likely cost significantly more to address in any meaningful way, and with its $300 sticker the AR.Drone isn’t exactly budget-minded in the first place. Having to buy an iOS device if you haven’t already got one throws in another hurdle.

The AR.Drone is an expensive toy, certainly, but it’s an appealing one, with enough geeky kudos to endear it to adults and children alike. The tipping point will be when – if – third-party developers pick up Parrot’s SDK in any significant way, and the quality of the applications they develop. If the AR.Drone can make a good case for augmented reality gaming, that should give the quadricopter a much-needed push further out of the toy-gimmick category.