Apple Red Friday Sale

Apple yesterday launched its one-day Red Friday sale in Asian markets such as Singapore. It’s the Asian equivalent of the U.S. Black Friday sale. In the U.S., Black Friday marks the starts of the Christmas holiday shopping season. Red Friday sort of marks the season before the Lunar New Year. The shopping reasons here are different though. We don’t give or exchange gifts on Lunar New Year. The closest to giving that we do are “red packets”.

But it doesn’t matter. It’s just a reason to shop, and shoppers just love having sales and discounts. It’s not quite the right time to buy any Apple hardware, though, because we’re all expecting refreshes coming up not too far away. There’s the iPad 3 and the rumoured slimmer MacBook Pro (or some reorganization of the MacBook Air/Pro product lines). So, actually, Red Friday wasn’t all that exciting. There were good discounts, however, if you happened to be already needing to buy something right away. MacBook Airs, for example, were going for S$120 less.

Something did catch my attention though. The Parrot AR.Drone. It’s now back to the original S$449 price, but it was going for about S$368 (almost 20% discount).

What is the AR.Drone? It’s a remote-controlled quadricopter. Yeah, you’ve seen those toy RC helicopters, and those are plenty cheap. This Parrot AR.Drone is rather expensive eh?

Well, it’s quite a different toy. This is remote-controlled over Wifi from a free iPhone or Android application. The gadget has four propellers, hence being called a quadricopter. It has two video cameras, one forward facing and the other downward facing, and live video can be streamed to the iPhone or Android application. It also has a bunch of sensors to help it automatically stabilize itself, hover over a fixed position, automatically maintain vertical separation from ground obstacles, etc.

The drone runs Linux, and Parrot provides a SDK so that you can build interesting applications with the AR.Drone. I had this pet project idea before: Build a robot guard that can patrol an area while providing video surveillance. This AR.Drone can almost be that platform to build such a solution. The “problem” with the AR.Drone, however, is its battery life. The AR.Drone’s specifications list its flight time as about 15 minutes on a single charge, although some independent reviewers have reported longer times, albeit only slightly.

Now, if someone could build some sort of inductive charging circuitry to recharge the AR.Drone’s battery… that would be awesome.