Helicopters (used for media coverage, passenger transport and medical emergency) provide the perfect template for the Aviation Authority and Amazon to base a framework of operation on.
The main considerations will be:
- Set routes/paths the drones must follow, taking I to account altitudes that minimise traffic with other things high up (buildings, aircraft, UFOs)
- emergency procedures and a risk assessment for each foreseeable eventuality (not that hard considering the lack of other traffic 'up there')
- limits on the amount of drones in the air within constrained geographic localities.
It is likely that this could all be agreed for a single trial city well before 2015 rolls around. This isn't rocket science...
I don't know about America but in the UK aviation authorities already permit flying models [1] and aerial work such as photography if certain requirements are met [2]. Regulators are understandably keen on collision avoidance, so they usually say UAVs must stay within the operator's line of sight - or have a 'sense and avoid' system. The UK's CAA "is not currently aware of any Sense-and-Avoid system with adequate performance and reliability" [3]
So, that's the regulatory challenge. Need to sense and avoid obstacles and other aircraft, and do a good enough job of it that aviation authorities will sign off on it.
(In addition to the regulatory challenge, there may also be business, operational and engineering challenges.)
Is it just me or this whole thing seems to be a big misunderstanding? To me it seems that the point the ads are making is : if you really have work that needs to be done, you can do it anywhere. Not necessarily you should work everywhere. Here it feels like 37signals is just tagging along the campaign for free publicity.
> "Is it just me or this whole thing seems to be a big misunderstanding?"
When thousands upon thousands of people (maybe tens of thousands, maybe more) look at your ad and take the opposite reaction away from it, the fault isn't with the audience.
Microsoft may not have intended to produce a hilarious dystopian ad campaign, but that's what they actually did. There's no misunderstanding, only insanely incompetent execution.
But I mean, "Microsoft marketing fails to get message across and achieves opposite effect" is not even a newsworthy headline anymore.
Wait. What? I thought this problem was already solved. My Lumia 920 easily lasts through the day without requiring a charge and is already almost a year old.
Lower-end and mid-range phones get this right more often than higher-end phones, I think. My Galaxy Light will easily last for a few days with light to moderate usage.
My Nexus 5 sat at 80% battery remaining after 26 hours off the charger this morning. This with regular checking of emails, a couple of Facebook forays, some quick tests of a web app, and all of the services and background apps such entails. And despite my office/business being in a rural area with very sketchy cell coverage (thus the phone has to work much harder).
Of course if I used much more screen on time my duration would be single digit hours instead. But such is the problem with comparing battery times when we all do different things with our devices, and use them in significantly different conditions.
That's interesting, for my nexus 5 (granted it's only a few days old so perhaps there is some break-in) seems to go down to 80-85% in 10-15 minutes of morning web surfing/reading.
With high brightness and a lot of active, screen-on use, it will absolutely chew through the battery (though 20% in 15 minutes is extremely excessive: For wifi browsing Anandtech found it to be among the top devices, actually beating the benchmark iPhone devices. They then removed that result from the listing pending the full review release). What impressed me most from it is the standby time which is extremely impressive, even in difficult conditions.
Ah, that's actually a great idea. Going to try it on my Surface RT :) It would be awesome if I could do some simple hacking on my tablet for those occasions I have to wait or when I'm in an airplane or something :)
Nokia has been making great windows phones for cheap like the 521 that routinely available for as little as 70 bucks. The hardware is lower spec as compared to this one but windows phone is known to run well on slower hardware. It will be interesting to see how well Android runs on this.
I have recently returned from business trips to China and India and it's a fair statement to say that people are either spending a whole bunch of money on flagship phones ($1000 for a Galaxy Note 3 in India), they're sticking with dumb phones, or they're reluctantly forking over $200-400 for entry level smart phones. Karbonn, Oppo, Meizu and others are all trying to crack this market, but until now they're spent more time trying to compete at the "cheaper flagships than Samsung/HTC/LG/Sony" than than the "accessible decent smartphone" market.
It seems very similarly specced to the htc first, the "facebook" phone, which is just about the best deal as far as used handsets go. I got mine for $140 shipped from gazelle's ebay store, and it has been a delight to use.
Glance is the feature I love a lot on my Nokia as well. The glance screen allows me to look at things like time on my phone without even turning it on.
I had a feature kind of like that on a flip phone about a decade ago, a really small second screen you could look at without flipping open the phone, to see who's calling or the current time, and battery level.
All you need do is standardize android phones to have a secondary screen on the other side that never turns off or needs to be unlocked, eink or whatever. Then transition that small screen to also display on your wrist.
That's great idea! Standardizing on an interface that can be implemented by standard phones as well means there'd probably be much better and more widespread support.
I suppose they could even support the "small secondary screen" interface on phones without a physical secondary screen, by simply displaying its contents inside the lock screen.
I used to have a foldable phone with a small secondary screen like that as well; it really was nice, and would be even better if it didn't need a button-press to activate (e-ink or whatever), as turning on the screen is always about 80% of the effort when I just want to see the time... [they can't make the button too easy to press after all, to avoid accidental activations...]
