Give your phone wings with the PhoneDrone Ethos

Drones have proven rather popular lately, but that fun comes with a relatively hefty price tag. The PhoneDrone Ethos wants to help lower this barrier to entry by using your everyday smartphone to power its flight.

The little drone makes use of the various sensors, processor and wireless capabilities found in our smartphones to control a lightweight chassis. Your phone basically sits in the cockpit as the pilot. Your phone can either be programmed with a specific mission or tethered up to another device for real time control and video streaming. The PhoneDrone has its own app which is used to perform these functions.

The PhoneDrone Ethos also features a protective mount for your smartphone, just in case anything unfortunately should happen to the drone in the air. I’d probably feel a bit uneasy about sending my expensive new flagship smartphone up there all alone, so it’s fortunate that the drone will work with lower cost Android handsets too. The creators also plan to openly release their controller API so that other apps can make use of the drone and allowing developers to create entirely new use cases.

The Kickstarter is well on its way to its $100,000 goal and there are plenty of packages left to grab. The limited early bird special costs $195, while the regular cost will be $235. 3D printer hobbyist can also buy all the parts and files they need to put one together themselves for just $95.

World’s first fully modular Android device, Fairphone 2, to arrive in December

If you were paying very close attention to the Android scene, then you might remember the Fairphone 1, a mid-tier device that put an emphasis on acquiring all of its parts and labor in an ethical way. That meant that everyone who built it earned a fair wage and none of its metal was scraped out of the ground by children or sold to finance an illegal army. Since so much of our technology is, as Louis C.K. puts it, a product of human suffering, this is a pretty important hill to make a stand on.

The Fairphone saw a degree of success, and now the company is expanding on their original premise and launching the Fairphone 2, which looks to give its owners a high degree of customization freedom by being totally modular.

The Fairphone 2 boasts all the moral high ground of its predecessor, but the company has made all of its parts easy to disassemble and replace, making it much like a desktop PC. The concept, which runs against contemporary economic theories involving planned obsolescence, looks to make the phone longer-lasting than other devices. When one part gets outmoded or busted, you just swap it out and keep trucking. No need to upgrade to a whole new phone.

It’s a refreshing idea, but that kind of innovation comes at a price. The Fairphone 2 has a price tag of €525 ($583), and only runs middle of the road hardware. 2 gigs of RAM and 32 gigs of internal storage. There’s an 8MP rear facing camera, and a 5” Full HD LCD display. Nothing to thrill, but the selling point here isn’t bombshell specs. The manufacturer claims the device should last you a full five years.

The Fairphone 2 is only being released in a handful of select European countries for the time being. The company is looking to expand in the future, and they’re also seeking to advance the freedom-of-ownership concept further by having future models come without pre-loaded Google software.  

Mass production of the Fairphone 2 will begin next month, and they’re expected to hit the market in December. You can pre-order the device on their website, and over 20,000 devices have already been reserved by those eager to get a fully modular device in their hands.

Does the Fairphone 2 look like something you’d be interested in?

UNKILLED update unleashes chat feature as well as new weapons, baddies, and missions

You may remember Madfinger Games as the guys behind the Shadowgun and Dead Trigger series, which have been outrageously popular. This September, they released a new first-person zombie shoot ‘em up called UNKILLED. Like Dead Trigger, UNKILLED takes refuge in audacity as an over-the-top thunderdome of unbridled fun. And also there’s some knock-out graphics.

Just now, Madfinger released a major update that comes stocked with twenty brand-new story missions, new weapons, and a new in-game chat feature that lets you stay in touch with your fellow zombie slayers mid-play. There’s also a new enemy slated to make a gruesome appearance sometime next week as part of a Halloween-themed special event. Furthermore, the game now supports Turkish language options, very handy if you’re of the Turkish persuasion.

For those new to the game, UNKILLED sees you taking charge of a character named Joe, a grade-A badass and member of Wolfpack, which is a privatized military unit based in New York whose sole goal is to track down zombies and eliminate them. The idea is to nip the whole zombie issue in the bud before it becomes an epidemic.

From a story-perspective, this is an interesting take on the genre because it lends the game a sense of stakes that tends to be lacking in the post-apocalyptic setting that tends to dominate zombie tales.

UNKILLED sports a slew of unlockables, one metric buttload of missions (300 prior to this update, although they’re each kind of short), and enough weapon variety to fill out even the most ecumenical gun nut’s armory (which is to say, over fifty different weapons). You’ll also encounter unique bosses and enemies. It’s an easy game to jump into, and it’s quite an addictive time killer. There are IAP’s, but UNKILLED is easy to jump into and it’s compatible with external controllers to boot. Although it’s currently not compatible with Android TV, Madfinger claims that they’ll be pushing that front sometime in the near future.

If you want to see our hands-on impression of UNKILLED, check it out over here. Better yet, grab it in the Google Play Store and give it a run yourself.

UNKILLED – Google Play Store