It’s a little friend asthmatics know all too well: the faithful, tiny, inhaler. Sometimes quite literally a life saver, most asthma sufferers have one and go through three or four a year. Now, in addition to allowing them to breathe, a scientist wants to use them to figure out why we get asthma in the first place.

How? With GPS units on inhalers!

It’s not as crazy as it sounds. The inhalers, which would also have a WiFi unit, would record location and time of use every time they were used, and send the information to a central server.

For the patient, it helps them and their doctor figure out what the patient might be doing to aggravate their asthma, or certain times and locations that might trigger an attack.

For the epidemiologists, it gives them a more detailed look at what parts of the country have the most asthma attacks, at what times, and in what conditions. Basically, they could get a better handle on what triggers attacks and how to fight it off.

There’s a lot of potential here to get insight into what triggers asthma and why. Of course, you still have to convince the people buying inhalers to shell out for what amounts to a bottle of steroids with an antenna on it, but one step at a time.

This is why I love my job: I can write headlines like this, because they are absolutely 100% true. DARPA wants to give one guy, on the ground, some fancy sunglasses that he will use to call in airstrikes. Suck on that, Call of Duty.

Also, are they for sale?

Here’s the deal: DARPA, of course, is the Pentagon’s absolutely insane research department. These are the guys building flying submarines, cars for the blind, and homing bullets (no, seriously: they are literally working on every single one of those projects). They want to be able to x-ray continents. They’re turning cockroaches into cyborgs. They’re above the law, have a huge amount of money, and are awesome and scary all at once.

So, when told to figure out a way to make calling in airstrikes a simple process with no paperwork and even fewer civilian casualties, DARPA has come back with goggles that overlay a map and other information onto the user’s visual field, allowing one guy to pick a target and send that target to the drone.

It’s still in testing stages, but one guy with airstrike power seems to me a little too conservative. Let’s give every soldier on the ground airstrike power. Why mess around? Airstrike goggles for everybody!

So, Windows 8 is in beta testing, and, almost inevitably, it has escaped from the beta lab and is rampaging across the wilderness, eating sheep and terrifying farmers…oh, wait, that was our genetic experiment.

No, it’s just hanging out on torrents, saying “‘Sup?” and getting downloaded by the curious to see how it’s different from Windows 7. So far, survey says…not that different!

As we don’t want to deal with a swarm of lawyers flying on their bat wings from Redmond to land on our roof and start throwing subpeonas and poo, we won’t be posting any of the leaked screenshots, but we’ll be happy to somebody who will. In short, it’s what you expect from a non-major change in Windows: same basic interface, same basic functions, plus some frillery and puffery that isn’t remotely necessary, but makes the OS look cool and helps you justify paying $100 for some software that really should have gone to an iPad or something.

The big news is that Windows is including an App Store, which will no doubt lead to even more “look and feel” jokes. Beyond that, well, it’s Windows. We’re not really sure what we’re supposed to get excited about here. Maybe it comes on a tablet?

The iPad is, of course, a cleverly designed, highly versatile tool, something we’ve covered repeatedly here on Gearcrave. But, thanks to their ongoing war/nerd fight/peeing match over Flash vs. HTML5, Adobe hasn’t really tapped the full potential of the iPad as an input tool for Photoshop.

Fortunately, just as a full-featured Photoshop for iPad is being developed, so are apps to use with your desktop to make Photoshop just that much better.

Adobe recently debuted three new apps for iPad that will be released at the same time as the 5.5 Creative Suite update. All three are great tools and dirt cheap, at least by the standards of what you generally pay for Photoshop.

The first, Nav, is fairly straightforward: you use it to select tools and photos while working, and it’s mostly designed for environments where quick turnover is the rule. It’s cleverly designed, though, and seems very efficient.

The second, Eazel, is what it sounds like: an input tool where you use your finger instead of your mouse, although we hope there’s stylus support for fine control. Finally, there’s Lava, which is essentially a color mixing palette.

None of them are really revolutionary in concept, but they’re great in execution, and we can’t wait to try them out.

HTC has had a meteoric rise in the smartphone world over the last few years, easily outpacing almost everyone on the market with their Droid and Windows Mobile phones, and achieving the impossible, like reviving Sprint as an actual player in the mobile market. And one of the favorites has been the Incredible, with phones like the Incredible S.

But you know what the Incredible was really missing? A big, scary, red Eye of Sauron on the home screen. A phone just isn’t a phone if you’re not feeling like a hobbit being chased by Ringwraiths every time you take your phone out to call the pizza place or something.

According to PocketNow, there isn’t a whole lot to be excited about for the phone beyond the omnipresent eye of evil (and yes, we know it’s the Droid logo. It just looks utterly ridiculous. Get over it.)

It’s essentially an Incredible S that’s had a quick specification polish. And, obviously, it’s going to be part of the Droid line of phones.

So when can you get your hands on this creepy all-seeing eye of coverage and Android Marketplace access? Later this month, according to leaked press materials. Then, it will see all.

Hey, remember when we used to store our information on magnetic media surrounded by a plastic shell?

No?

I feel old now.

Anyway, the external hard drive has, along with the Flash drive, been our faithful friend. And like all technological faithful friends, it has been getting ever smaller and ever larger in capacity. But Seagate’s latest drive might just take the cake.

As you can tell from the photo, the drive is tiny. How tiny? It’s literally the thickness of a pencil. Even better, though, is what’s under the hood.

320GB of storage may not be huge in the scheme of things, but it’s a lot of room on a little drive, especially considering we’re getting into flash drive territory with that size. Even better, it runs on USB 3.0 and can hit speeds of up to 40MB/sec when transferring to and from a USB 3.0 enabled computer.

Best of all is the cost; a drive you can fit in a shirt pocket used to cost a fortune, back in the day (there I go, feeling old again). Now it’s $99.

Yeah, you have absolutely no excuse whatsoever not to be carrying around a backup of your important materials now. Get over it and make a backup, bunky.

Did you want to get an iPhone from AT&T with a shorter contract, the sooner to jailbreak it? Or maybe you just don’t want a contract with AT&T, but do want an iPhone? You’re going to pay for the privilege.

Granted, AT&T has never been really possessed of much in the way of common sense, but this move seems custom made to drive customers into Verizon’s loving arms. How much is it going to cost you?

$50 for all smartphones off-contract, and a wince-inducing $150 for those with a one-year contract. So basically if you were hoping to upgrade to a better phone for a minimal cost, AT&T just hawked a big ol’ loogie right in your eye.

AT&T is playing the “Hey, subsidizing these things costs a lot” card, which would be fair if the timing of this didn’t stink to high heaven. If that were really the case, why does it apply to the iPhone 3GS? You just cut the subsidized cost of that to $49, AT&T. Don’t tell us that’s started costing more, not with the iPhone 4 on the market.

No, this makes us think they wanted to convince iPhone customers to sign for two years just to save some money up front. Yeah, good luck with that.

Adobe and Apple haven’t been buddies ever since Apple decided it was going to hire all of the Premiere team and make a video editing program that wasn’t outrageously broken. It’s a fight that only got worse when Apple banned Flash from iPhone and iPad in favor of HTML 5. Adobe has recently made a peace gesture by creating Wallaby, which can transcode Flash to HTML 5, and now is showing another allegedly experimental technology: Photoshop.

Yes, Adobe has developed Photoshop for the iPad, but they’re claiming it’s just a demo and that they’re totally not going to release it for the iPad. Like totally not. They just spent all that money on developing an expensive version of their most popular software on a concept! Honest! Photoshop Express will be the only version of Photoshop available on iPad! Really!

We’d be more sarcastic, but that’s really kicking Adobe in the middle of eating humble pie, so instead we’ll talk about the demo. It’s pretty all around amazing, and takes full advantage of the touchscreen for precision and accuracy. For an alleged demo, it’s incredibly fully featured, hence all the smart remarks about how this’ll never get released. This’ll be on iPad by the end of 2012, mark our words.

As we all know, often from painful experience, AT&T has a terrible network. So terrible, it had to buy an entire other carrier just to get up to speed on 4G. Unfortunately, until that happens, there needs to be other solutions, especially since iPhone customers are jumping ship to Verizon left and right. So AT&T has to get proactive to keep those profitable customers and boost its network.

So, free femtocells for everyone!

Yes, if you’re an iPhone or an iPad customer, you’re getting a free femtocell…whether you want one or not. AT&T is giving you one for free, but installing it is mandatory.

“Sure, we made billions off the iPhone, but why should we invest that in our network? What are you going to do? Go to Sprint?” guffawed an anonymous AT&T employee. “We just made ten million of these femtocells and made it part of your contract retroactively. That’ll solve the calling problems.”

But what happens when AT&T customers inevitably quit the carrier? “Who would do that? Besides, you have to glue them somewhere that they can boost the signal, and the glue is permanent.” said the anonymous employee.

So, there you have it. Enjoy your femtocell.

Oh, and April Fools!

One of the key selling points of Google’s Android platform was its open source mentality; anybody could have the code! Anybody could do anything with Android! It’s your mobile phone OS! It’s free! Free!

Many analysts predicted that this would do two things: make Android the number one smartphone OS and backfire horribly and cause dozens of broken versions of Android. Guess what? They were right. Now Google is yanking some control back, and its partners are less than happy about it, as in “talking to the Justice Department” unhappy.

At issue is the fact that Google has started demanding that any major changes to Android be run by them first. Which sounds reasonable until you realize it allows Google to, say, stall phones that have Bing deeply integrated into their software (like anybody uses Bing anyway) or to take a look at what Facebook is planning for their Facephone, or that it basically gives Google the right to tell manufacturers who they can or cannot partner with.

Android is still open-source, and it’s still the OS of choice for smartphone manufacturers. But expect the whining to pick up a bit more, especially when Google vetoes a lucrative partnership of some sort.

It’s an article of faith among travelers: you have to shut off your cell phone on the flight because it might disrupt the navigational equipment. And while you won’t be able to take it on a commercial flight yet, Aircell, leading providers in in-the-air telephony, are happy to sell you the first Android smartphone for in-flight use. Price is currently unavailable, but we’re going to guess “expensive”.

Or you could just use your actual cell phone, since the entire reason you can’t use your cell phone in-flight is due to bureaucratic problems, not science.

You may be wondering why we’re calling out Aircell for this. Well, because it’s just a shameless attempt to wring a couple of hundred dollars out of businessmen who don’t understand science.

The problem is not now and never has been electrical interference: it’s bureaucracy. If electrical interference were actually a problem, you’d have to check your cell at the ticket counter. Cell phones have never been tested for safety on an airplane by the federal government, and the government doesn’t want to do the testing because it would be expensive, complex, and not to their benefit, even if the Mythbusters are willing to do it for them. The airlines, having no safety data and being legally on the hook if anything goes wrong, have responded by banning all cell phone use.

So, if you want an airplane-safe cellphone, write your Congressman and tell him to get the FAA off its lazy duff and do its job instead of buying a spare smartphone with a proprietary jack and some shielding thrown in for looks.

It may not to be a function that most Android users care about, but it’s something developers have been eagerly anticipating for months. No, not Google unlocking Honeycomb. No, not Google repairing Honeycomb from its painfully busted beta state. Nope, they’re finally ready to test…in-app billing.

OK, so Android developers being given more opportunities to take your money may not sound very exciting to anybody other than MMO developers, but it is actually fairly important.

Take one app you’ve probably played a lot: “Angry Birds”. At some point, you’ve probably been tempted to use the Bald Eagle to crush those stupid pigs once and for all. But that, of course, requires you to pay ninety-nine cents to do so. Instead of quitting out of the app, going to the store, finding the Bald Eagle, buying it, installing it, and restarting the game, you just go to the pause menu, buy the Bald Eagle and make yourself some pork cutlets.

It greatly streamlines the experience, obviously, but equally as importantly, it give developers the means and the motive to add revisions and new functionality to their apps, i.e. more software support. And that’s good for everybody.

Well, unless you’re the Oatmeal, but there’s only one of him, alas.