To completely rip off Rock, Paper, Shotgun: Sundays are for watching TV, playing video games and building up your BitTorrent ratio. As it turns out, Sundays are also for finding out that the iPod touch is being used in American military theaters, helping troops translate from one tongue to another, taking photos and showing them to locals (“see, your town’s mayor really does like us!”) and any number of other, high-techy things. Hooray for Sundays, then.
There’s a few reasons why the military has chosen the iPod touch. First, and probably foremost is price. A new iPod touch costs Uncle Sam only $230; who know how much a military-specific, tax payer dollar-funded device from a Raytheon or a Stark Industries would cost! Two, most soldiers are already familiar with the iPod touch; many of them own one or an iPhone. That minimizes the amount of device training troops would have to undergo. Three, the touch is fairly versatile device. Apps can be programmed without too much effort, and it won’t break very easily.
Soldiers use the iPod touch in a number of situations. They can translate from Arabic (and others) using Vcommunicator. Software is in development that would allow a soldier to take a photo of, say, a street sign, send it off to HQ, then get all sorts of intelligence for the surrounding area.
Groovy. (And all that without a single Swiss Army Knife metaphor. Well done, me.)
Photo: Flickr
How do they take pics when the Touch has no camera?
Ha. I was just about to ask the same!
I want that advanced military-spec software that enables an iPod Touch to take pictures without cameras, oh boy, I do want that.
*sigh* I want an iPod Touch. Will someone give me one? Even a used one? :)
I heard Stark Industries shut down its weapons manufacturing division though, so they wouldn’t even be able to accept this project if they got it.
Well, yeah, but it wouldn’t be a weapons contract; it would be a multimedia-communications device contract…
Plus, don’t tell me you don’t want Apple to swap out the weak batteries in an iPhone for a Stark Industries mini-arc-reactor.
Sorry, but this article is bulls$!t.
Excuse me, is this an iPod touch from Mars, taking snaps without a camera? If that’s the case, then WOW! do tell me where I can buy it.
People, or whatever you are! It is not illegal to think for yourself.
It’s quite obvious the picture software is being developed for iPhone and not iPod touch (unless the military has been given pre-notice of a future iPod touch with build-in camera, of course).
It seems strange that people commenting on a tech site like this would not know that the iPod touch and iPhone are basically similar devices except for the 3G radio the and camera (and a few other but minor details).
True the article only mentions the touch, but that wouldn’t be the first time a journalist has gotten a technical detail wrong. The army clearly is buying both iPod touches and iPhones.
(forgot to include aGPS in the list of differences between iPhone and iPod touch)
That raises a really good question… Why doesn’t the iPod Touch have a camera? I understand the whole “Steve Jobs told people they don’t want one and so they believe it” theory, but it would be the perfect hardware upgrade if they threw a decent 5MP on there…
The military uses a dongle camera that can act as a FLIR, etc, etc, etc, making the iPhone camera less than mickey mouse. They develop software for the touch to make use of the camera. Any questions?
several guys have started using “Bulletflight” to help calculate long-range bullet ballistics.
All they need is an iPhone and install the app. With a third-party mount, it can be attached to a rifle’s accessory rail.
witnessed a marksman use of these to great effect, everything from distance to wind speed to temperature are taken into account.