Technical Pro

Like most DARPA-sponsored projects, the Nano air Vehicle ($TBA) isn’t the easiest item to describe. Under development by AV, it’s designed to be used in urban surveillance and reconnaissance missions, mimicking the biology of a hummingbird to achieve impressive statistics such as a hover endurance of eight minutes with no external power source, the ability to fly indoors and out, transitioning easily between the two, the ability to be controlled using nothing but the live video stream from the aircraft, and the ability to fly in windy conditions. Oh, and it looks a lot like a real hummingbird — you know, just in case the whole “robot animals spying on you” bit wasn’t creepy enough.

We’ll go ahead and let you try it first, but the folks behind Liquipel ($59) claim their clear coating “protects every feature of your device with a revolutionary waterproof shield.” The Liquipel permanently bonds on the molecular level to your device, both inside and out, and is said to keep your phone working even if you drop it in water (creek, bath tub, Kool-Aid, etc.). Certain iPhone, HTC, Samsung, and Motorola devices can take the Liquipel treatment and their subsequent plunges now.$59

 

Home control Switch

WeMo’s main building block. Plug anything you want to control into the Home Control Switch, and control it with the WeMo app. It’s easy and simple, but don’t let that fool you. There’s no limit to what you can do with the Home Control Switch.

Whether you want to boggle would-be burglars or just save money on your home energy bill, Belkin’s WeMo home automation system has you covered. It lets you control electrical outlets in your home from your smart phone. Turn lights on and off or power down electronics after you’ve left. It even has a motion sensing mode, so even if you forget to turn stuff off via your phone, it’s still working to save you money.

Motion Sensor

WeMo to truly automate activities in your home. Lights go on when and where you need them. Have WeMo guard the front door. Games and TV and stereos go off in the playroom when the kids leave and forget to turn everything off. It’s up to you!

The App

The WeMo app runs the show. It allows you to turn your stuff on or off—from anywhere. You can even put anything (or everything!) on a schedule.

Coming soon for iPhone and iPad

Seagate just took the wraps off what’s likely the niftiest portable HDD to cross our path in a long, long while. The GoFlex Satellite is part storage device, part wireless media streamer, and it manages to wear both hats with little compromise on either end. For all intents and purposes, this is a standard 500GB GoFlex HDD with a bit of extra girth, an AC input, an 802.11b/g/n WiFi module and a built-in web server. The reason for those extras? A simple depression of the on / off button starts the streamer up, and it’s ready for a connection in around 30 to 40 seconds. Once fired up you can stream data to just about anything — even iOS devices. that’s an impressive feat, not quite a “first” moment as Seagate would like you to believe (we’ll give that crown to AirStash), but still a rarity.

Our unit shipped with a GoFlex USB 3.0 adapter and a car charger, with the latter enabling users to entertain their children on long road trips — a nice addition, we have to say. Installation is a cinch; just fire up a media sync application that resides on the drive (for OS X users, anyway), and you’re ready to drag and drop files as if it’s any ‘ole HDD. No media management software or anything of the sort, thankfully. The purpose of having your media onboard is to stream videos, photos, documents and music to your iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, or any other tablet, phone or laptop with WiFi. You heard right — while there’s only a dedicated app for the iOS family, any WiFi-enabled device with a web browser can tap into this. Care to hear our take on this $200 do-it-all hard drive? Have a look at our review video just after the break.

The drive itself — while patently gigantic compared to the GoFlex Slim — is still highly portable, and it’s way easier to lug around than any other media streamer we’ve seen. It’s also just $199.99, which tends to be the going rate for higher-end streamers with half a terabyte of storage baked in. Only this one, of course, packs a built-in battery and could easily slide into your front rear pocket. We were immediately struck by just how easy file transfer were — we anticipated having to deal with yet another piece of kludgy software in order to get our tunes and videos over to the HDD, but it truly acts like a standard hard drive. Just drag files over and organize however you want, and the app / web server sorts it accordingly.

The iOS app (there’s an iPad version and a separate iPhone / iPod touch version) is relatively spartan, but certainly gets the job done. There’s a handful of categories and view options, but the Folder View seemed to be the most sophisticated. That’s the only one that actually gave us a view to our music in actual folders, so you’ll likely end up spending the most of your sorting time there. We’re thrilled to report that the app is both quick and accurate, and during our testing we had no issues getting it to pull content; better still, it’ll stream to three different devices at once. Unfortunately, the Photos pane doesn’t support scrolling through images, but we’re hoping that Seagate throws that in on a future build.

Naturally, things work best on an iOS device, but any tablet / handheld / computer with a WiFi module and a web browser can theoretically take advantage. We connected through the mobile Safari browser as well as the browser on our Nexus One (Android 2.3), and while the former gave nearly the same experience as the app (albeit with slightly longer loading times), the latter had one particular pain point. Viewing photos and listening to music on Android’s browser was a cinch, but viewing videos… no so much. Our phone kept trying to download entire videos rather than streaming them, so we’d caution non-iOS users to expect some limitations if you buy in.

Is the GoFlex Satellite worth its weight in gold? Depends. If you’re an avid iOS user, you need some extra storage space anyway, and you’d rather house all of your media on a 500GB external drive than on the device itself, Seagate’s latest concoction is a total must-have. It works well, and the built-in battery is capable of streaming for four to five hours on a charge. It’s hardly the most robust media streamer on the market, but it’s also one-of-a-kind. For those who tend to roll with other operating systems, we’d probably hold out until the company (hopefully!) adds dedicated Android / Windows Phone 7 / etc. apps — and who knows, by that time you may be getting a 1TB model for the same scratch.

Tear up the icy landscape in the retro-styled Arctic Cat ProCross F 1100 50th Anniversary Snowmobile ($13,000). Powered by a turbo 4-stroke, 1056cc twin-cylinder engine that puts out an intense 177 horsepower, this beast features electric start, RMC brake system, deluxe digital/analog gauge (with speed, tach, odometer, trip meters, engine hour meter, clock, fuel level indicator, and altimeter), Arctic Race Suspension with Fox Float 2 shocks and sway bar, electronic push-button reverse, and vintage Arctic Cat 50th anniversary graphics. Also available in a special Uncrate colorway.[Thanks Uncrate]

Ruggedness and svelte design tend to be mutually exclusive features — but not in the Sony Cyber-Shot TX200V Waterproof Camera ($500). Measuring just 16mm deep, the TX200V is waterproof to five meters, dustproof, and freeze-proof, and doesn’t skimp of the features, either, which include an 18.2 megapixel Exmor R CMOS sensor, 1080/60p video recording, a 3-inch LCD touchscreen, a 5x optical zoom lens, high-speed autofocus, the ability to shoot at full resolution at up to 10 fps, face detection technology, a built-in GPS and Compass, and optical image stabilization. Arriving in March. [Thanks Uncrate]

Strap a yoga ball to 16 horizontally rotating propellers and apparently you can claim a world’s first.   German aircraft company E-Volo slapped together something they’re calling a Multicopter and recently they achieved the first manned flight that lasted about 90 seconds.

If the prototype looks familiar, that’s probably because you’ve seen a variety of quadricopter in the last few years, the most notable being Parrot’s A.R. Drone.  However, up until this point all them have been too small to lift a person off the ground.

The Multicopter is controlled using a wireless remote and apparently will float, much in the same fashion as Parrot’s quadricopter, without any human input, though it’s not clear if E-Volo has incorporated a variety of sensors unlike the A.R. Drone.  However, there are a set of onboard computers that calculate the rotational speed of the propellers and thus control altitude and the direction of travel.

This version of the multicopter is powered purely on battery juice, but the company says that they might develop a gas and electric hybrid version which would increase flight times from 10-30 minutes to perhaps an hour.

We’re really not sure what we would do with a multicopter.  In fact, it reminds us of the Segway – cool tech but not really practical in any application.  Then again, the military could surely use somethings like this to perform recon, though it might be a bit too large and manned flight is slowly being eliminated from their strategy.

Provide the full gamut of gameday goodness without a whole mess of tools with the Blacktop 360 grill-Fryer ($250). Obviously designed by hungry — and possibly drunk — humans, the 360 combines a deep fryer, grill, griddle, and warming plate into a single circular gas-powered wonder, letting you grill burgers, cook bacon, fry onion rings and get your buns warmed up all without moving an inch. [Scouted by Dustin]