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Bigelow Aerospace plans an inflatable habitat for lunar orbit
Bigelow Aerospace has been working on inflatable space habitats for a while now. The company sent a small inflatable unit to the ISS that added a small living area on the space station and it partnered with United Launch Alliance (ULA) last year on plans to launch its B330 module to Low Earth Orbit. Now, the company has just announced that it will continue the partnership and send another B330 inflatable habitat to Low Lunar Orbit by 2022.
Apple opening store in Anchorage, Alaska
Apple will open its most northerly store in Anchorage, Alaska, later this year according to ifoAppleStore. It will be nearly 300 miles north of the current most northerly store in Aberdeen, Scotland, and within driving distance of the Arctic Circle. Apple is currently advertising for retail staff to work in the space that it's taking over from the Eddie Bauer chain (don't worry, Eddie Bauer is only moving downstairs) in the city's Fifth Avenue Mall. At 61 degrees north, Anchorage is about 600 miles south of the Arctic Circle. The new Apple Store seems likely to remain its most northerly outpost for a while unless the citizens of Murmansk get up a petition to be granted their own Genius Bar.
Alaska Airlines fires up in-flight WiFi between Anchorage and Fairbanks, promises more in 2011
It's hard to say if Alaska Airlines' relationship with Row44 has fizzled, but unlike that WiFi'd route between San Jose and Seattle, the aforesaid airline is relying on Aircell to provide in-flight WiFi on flights between Anchorage and Fairbanks. Reportedly, Gogo service is live today for customers flying between those two locales, with it being completely gratis until the remainder of Aircell's network in the state of Alaska goes live over the next few months. Best of all, Aircell has promised to "expand its network to include Southeast Alaska by the end of the year," ensuring that it's not The Last Frontier in absolutely every possible way.
Track an iPad from Shenzhen to you
There's a fun post at Silicon Alley Insider today that traces an iPad's journey from China to the customer's home. By monitoring Twitter and tracking reports, Nick Saint has assembled an iPad's typical journey to the US. It starts at the infamous Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China. That's the "iPad nursery," if you will. From there, iPads destined for the USA fly to Anchorage, Alaska, a journey that Google Maps struggled with (38 days by car? Oh, it'd be much shorter by car). From there, the iPad that Nick was tracking went to Louisville, Kentucky, where it will remain (UPS shipping calls it "UPS Internal Activity") until it's set free on Saturday. Many TUAW readers wrote in to say they've received shipment notifications, so we can assume that your precious is somewhere along this route. In the meantime, why not install a package tracking app on your iPhone (you remember your iPhone, right)?
No joke: Qualcomm's Snapdragon prototypes don't use Snapdragon
We seriously have no idea what Qualcomm was thinking here, but it turns out that those two so-called "Snapdragon prototypes" being shown at CES this year... wait for it... don't use the Snapdragon platform. Now, that would've been just fine with us had Qualcomm made it clear that they were built using its existing chipsets, but they didn't. Here's the best part: Qualcomm actually contacted us with a minor correction on our original story (they wanted us to point out that their ARM-based cores are highly customized) without bothering to mention that our "Snapdragon-powered" statement was not accurate. Anyway, it turns out that the Anchorage and Fairbanks prototypes are merely meant to demonstrate "examples of what Snapdragon-enabled devices will feature," which begs the question: if the current MSM series chipsets are capable of the same functionality, aren't those probably the wrong features to be demonstrating? That behavior walks a fine line between poorly executed PR and outright deception, Qualcomm, and we'd ask that you not let it happen again.[Thanks, Sascha]
Hands-on with Qualcomm's Snapdragon-powered "Anchorage"
We sat down with one of Qualcomm's fancy new reference designs today, the Anchorage QWERTY slider phone. Let's be perfectly clear -- the Inventec-crafted device won't ever see the light of day in this exact form, Qualcomm just needed some eye candy with which to demonstrate its new Snapdragon platform. The chipset features a highly specialized and customized ARM-based core and graphics from ATI -- both actually licensed this time around, we're told -- and tries to take advantage of as many technologies that Snapdragon offers as possible: MediaFLO support, blazing clock speeds (1GHz to be exact), high resolutions (SVGA here), and the list goes on. Snapdragon-powered devices should hit retail from HTC and Samsung by the end of the year. Click on for pics, just don't get too attached since this is as close as you'll ever get to it, alright?%Gallery-13243%
Qualcomm shows off new mobile reference designs
Let's put aside Qualcomm's legal woes for just a moment and turn our attention to something a little more interesting and heartwarming: awesome-looking prototype devices. The company is showing off a pair of reference designs showcasing its new Snapdragon chipset, a heap of silicon said to offer one of the best power to performance ratios in the mobile world. First up, the "Fairbanks" is Qualcomm's idea of what a next-gen dedicated GPS unit might look like, rocking a 3 megapixel still / video camera, TV tuner, and microSD expansion on some sort of custom Windows CE base. Next up, the "Anchorage" (pictured) does the typical slide-out QWERTY smartphone concept in pure style with one critical difference -- this one is humming along at a staggering 1GHz. It's got pretty much every kind of radio one could want or need and apparently has enough horsepower to hoist a full OS, which only serves to further our deep, dark depression that they're not-for-retail concepts.
