Per
Year Apple IPads Saving US Air Force $5.7 Million
The US Air Force lately abandoned 40 pounds value of paper maps,
charts, logs and other paperwork from its aircraft. That paper was replaced
with Apple iPads and the price savings are amazing.
The iPad devices which are deployed to
18,000 planes are economy the Air Force an estimated $5.7 million per year.
The iPads are being called an
“electronic flight bag” because they hold flight manuals, weather and
navigation charts and various pieces of technical and procedural information.
In the past a flight bag would contain 30 to 40 pounds worth of materials.
The iPad flight bags are
expected to save $750,000 on fuel costs each year alone.
The Air Force spent $9
million to procure the Apple iPads which means the agenda will pay for itself
after just 18 months.
Apple
iPad units are all of the Wi-Fi only variety with 32GB of internal
storage. Apple provided the devices with a bulk discount rate of $520 per unit,
a savings of nearly $80 per unit.
In some cases the size of the
aircraft can mean bigger savings. For example, a C-5 military aircraft can save
490 pounds in paper weight thanks to the use of a single iPad.
The Air Force has deployed
16,000 third-generation iPads to its Air Mobility Command while the rest have
been deployed to various other divisions of the US Air Force.
Switching from paper
documents to Apple iPad and other tablet devices is becoming average practice
in the aviation manufacturing. Many commercial airlines have equipped flight
attendants, pilots and other personnel with tablet PCs in place of heavy and
cumbersome paper documents.
Do you think touching from
printed documents to lightweight iPad and other tablet devices is
a smart move for the US Air Force and commercial airlines?
Samsung Galaxy S4
We have the details. Finally. The Samsung Galaxy S IV event has
come and gone, and what have we gotten from it? maybe totally unrelated to the
actual product people have been waiting for, the production was somehow out of
this world. The LA Times described the show as “Broadway-esque”, with a kid tap-dancing, a ballerina, a bored
housewife, and a hot gardener. I don’t know how that combination will get
people to take the Galaxy S IV for a spin (although a hot gardener does
have its target market), but you never know what goes on in the mind of creative’s.
Judging by the reactions online, though, the event was a train wreck.
Forget the funky
concepts designs that have been floating around-this is the official Samsung
Galaxy S IV shown at the launch event yesterday.
Now for the things
that matter: the official Samsung Galaxy S IV features. Are they going to
blow you away?
The highlights:
·
Cat 3 100/50Mbps
(downloads at 100 Mbps, uploads at 50Mbps)
·
Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/a/c
(HT80)
·
Bluteooth 4.0, IR LED
(Remote Control), MHL 2.0
·
13mp camera, 2mp front
·
2gb of LP DDR3 RAM
·
16GB HD with 32, 64
and microSD
·
Battery: removable
2,600 mAh
·
Two models: black mist
and white frost
·
Corning’s Gorilla
Glass 3
·
5 inch Full HD Super
AMOLED (1920 x 1080) display, 441 ppi
·
Android 4.2.2 Jelly
Bean
Speculators got the eye-tracking feature down, but it seems we’re not going to have the 3D camera.
Not a loss, really.
Price 780$USD
You might have noticed
something missing from that list – the processor. Well, nothing short of a
Whopper – not the Junior – is going to be used: 1.6GHz EXYNOS 5 Octo-Core
processor. Does this equate to eight cores or two quad-cores? No matter what
angle you approach it from, that’s a whole lot of power for a phone. Or does
the Galaxy S IV count as a phablet now? Whatever category the phone falls
under, I can’t, for the life of me, imagine why I would need so much power for
such a device.
One of the official Samsung Galaxy S IV features that is
rather interesting is technology from Mobeam. This basically allows “pulses of infrared light to essentially
fool traditional scanners into thinking the light represents a barcode”. (Source) The implications
revolve around the use of the phone to communicate with POS systems which rely
on barcode scanners. Retrofitting a new gadget to existing, prevalent
technology might prove to be a good move.
S Translator
Honorable mentions include S Translator, which allows live text-to-speech (and vice
versa) translation of nine languages and Group Play, which allows you to play music through up to
eight Galaxy S IV devices without needing the Internet. Now if your circle
of friends are Samsung/Android fans, and eight of you can afford to buy the
latest in the Galaxy S series, the latter feature could be very useful. If you
meet face-to-face on a regular basis, that is.
Given the highlights
of the official Samsung Galaxy S IV features, how do you feel? Put
away your biases (for or against, it doesn’t matter) for a moment, and let us
know! As for me, while I think “black mist and white frost” are way better than
“pebble blue and marble white”, I’m totally fine with “black and white”, if you
know what I mean.
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