Tristan Rayner / Android Authority
Good morning! There’s nothing like a good night’s sleep while it’s storming outside, right?
To keep a promise
A few days ago I linked to a paywall article on delivery drones: The short story is that the FAA is on board with evolving (and less strict) regulations, drone deliveries are increasing.
The delivery of drones was something of a talking point in the mid-2010s. I think a lot of people have seen or heard of Amazon doing this through 60 Minutes in 2013, because promised packages would come to your door at high speed. The Amazon Prime Air video, where the first full customer delivery took place in December 2016, which Jeff Bezos tweeted, was also a big moment that felt like progress. Then came the inevitable desert of drone delivery: The hype was too big, it was slow. A 2019 pitch by Amazon CEO Jeff Wilke said drone deliveries would take place “within months.” A grim picture was painted by Wiredin 2021 about Amazon’s Prime Air battle in the UK.
But things happen:
The latest news is that Wing, a true, active drone delivery service that is part of Alphabet and operates in Australia and Finland, is launching a new run in the Dallas-Fort Worth area through Walgreens: “Walgreens… will make deliveries from a parking lot in the town of Little Elm, Texas.Using Wing’s drone delivery app, customers can choose from 100 items, including over-the-counter medicines and household supplies, said a Walgreens spokesperson.Deliveries are made via a rope and hook system: the Wing drones speed at 65 mph, carrying up to 3.3 pounds of goods.A person attaches the delivery box to the drone hook, the drone coils it and similarly lowers the packages to the ground to pick them up. It’s great that getting prescriptions can be done quickly and easily, for example, and pet prescriptions are possible through non-Walgreens options through Wing. getting ice cream, which is true in 2022 life.
others:
The thing with drones is that they’re not really in cities, but more in regional and rural areas, a counterpoint to the usual tech trends. People like Zipline are buzzing with medicines to places like Kenya and North Carolina, vaccines to Ghana and Walmart goods to Arkansas. Manna operates 2,000-3,000 flights daily in Ireland. There’s a lot more, but the general feeling is that there are some places where these drones are completely normal. But the FAA requires pilot oversight and built-up cities aren’t part of operations yet, meaning the vast majority of people are wondering where their drones are.
To round up
🔜 Galaxy Z Flip 4 and Fold 4 retain side fingerprint scanners, as it should (Android Authority).
🤔 It looks like Google Japan is preparing apps to play IRL arcade claw games in Japan: Prizes will ship and all, but Google is limiting pricing, including not allowing NFTs (Gizmodo).
Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
This is smart: The New York Times has a new one WordleBotgiving you welcome feedback on your strategy/passive-aggressive insult to your strategy.
The idea: “I’ll examine your puzzle and tell you what I might have done differently.” Basically, you complete the Wordle as you normally would and then open the Wordle bot page for some feedback. The folks at Mashable are upset here by what I like: “My colleague, Mashable Australia editor Caitlin Welsh, was equally offended by such a rigid approach to strategy, not because she was making a bad guess, but because in fact she had a strategy, and WordleBot was just too ignorant to see it. “Sorry WordleBot,” she said, “my third guess today did exactly what I meant, confirming the placement of the letters? It wasn’t ‘wasted!’”
Cheers,
Tristan Rayner, editor in chief.
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This post Daily Authority: 🦅 Drone Delivery…delivers!
was original published at “https://www.androidauthority.com/daily-authority-april-8-2022-3150820/”
