This is all based on conjecture, but I did ask a few of the engineers if they were working on an air purifier and they neither confirmed nor denied the claim. It only makes sense considering the fact that the Airblade actually sucks in the surrounding air and purifies 99.9 percent of it before spewing said air 400MPH onto your hands. Why else would Dyson have an in-house Microbiology lab? It can’t possibly be there for just the Airblade, right? Right?!

You may or may not have noticed, but I wasn’t around all that much last week and, no, I was not on vacation like our fearless leader, I was trekking ass across the Atlantic for a visit to Malmesbury, England. Yeah, I had no idea where that was until I arrived at Heathrow airport and hopped into a car for a two-hour drive west. I awoke from my slumber to a quaint little town in Wiltshire at the front entrance to Dyson’s HQ. Yes, that Dyson, the folks who make the vacuums that never lose suction.

Now, vacuums typically don’t jump out at me as must-have gadgets, but Dyson’s are unique in that they’re a perfectly balanced blend of style and engineering. They look really cool. A heck of a lot cooler than your mom’s old Hoover, at least.

So what exactly was I doing in Malmesbury at Dyson, you might ask. Well, I had the opportunity to be the first journo to have a peek into Dyson’s RDD center, which is aptly named the hangar. The entire team of 400 or so engineers/designers are situated in a section of the compound that once housed the manufacturing side of the business before it moved to Malaysia. It was huge. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to snap any photos just to show you the ginormity of the space for legal reasons, but just imagine an empty Costco with nothing but work benches.

Stick around this week because I’ll have plenty of content from the trip that includes a one on one with James Dyson where he spills the beans on his love/hate relationship with the iPhone as well as some of his favorite gadgets, which will certainly surprise you because I was floored. Oh, and a short video of James ‘testing’ one of his vacuums for durability, why you’ll want to replace your sheets every day or, at the very least, wash them every few days, and a video of the Airblade sucking in ‘poo air’ and replacing it with clean air. The coolest thing out of the entire trip is that I got to sit down with Will Davies, from the video, and we designed a new attachment for the DC16 aka Root 6. We hammered out a design in roughly four hours over CAD and the next day I walked away with the only prototype. It was sweet. More on that later this week.

iRiver Mplayer: The Mickey Mouse DAP
Dell Adds Colors, Webcams, Fingerprint Readers To Inspiron Notebooks, Kills Dimension Brand
Dyson Airblade: No Sucking, Just Blowing
Magician Doing Green Laser Tricks
Iomega Introduces New Portable External Drives

Dyson today announced the U.S. launch of Dyson Airblade, the fastest, most hygienic hand dryer available on the market and a solution to one of the concerns of restroom users. And here’s the video to prove it. Sorry, I had a case of the shakes, but you can still see Sir James Dyson showing of his magical blowing machine. (Nothing but quality content for our readers!)

Seriously though, this thing does work well, basically squeegeeing the water off your hands in a few seconds leaving every nook and cranny dry. Click on ahead to read up on the benefits of installing this $1,400 hand dryer in your establishment and see some hot, hot pictures of insides of the Airblade.

The motor.

Speed:
Dyson Airblade utilizes the DDM to produce a 400 mph stream of clean air, blown through a gap no thicker than an eyelash. This sheet of air acts like an invisible windshield wiper, wiping moisture from hands leaving them completely dry in 12 seconds – a full 10 seconds faster than any other hand dryer.

The consumer survey found that nearly six out of ten respondents prefer to use paper towels instead of electric heated dryers. Their two main reasons for avoiding hand dryers are that they take too long (69%) and they don’t dry their hands properly (49%).

The HEPA filter.
Hygiene:
Traditional hand dryers simply suck up dirty restroom air, heat it and blow it back on to hands, leaving them damp and more prone to spread bacteria. Damp hands spread 1,000 times more bacteria than dry hands. Dyson Airblade uses a HEPA filter to remove more than 99.9% of the bacteria from the air used to dry hands. It also features touchless infra-red sensor technology and an anti-microbial additive coating to reduce bacterial and fungal growth.

The NSF International study found that paper towel dispensers were among those items in bathrooms with an average of 1,000 to 10,000 bacteria per square inch. In particular, the dispensing slot of paper towel units is rarely, if ever cleaned. Staphylococcus aureus bacteria were detected on approximately 4% of the total number of surfaces, with a high concentration on paper towel dispensers.

You can see the force of the air coming out of the Airblade (below) is strong enough to cause the flesh on my hand to indent.

Energy-efficiency:
Dyson Airblade uses up to 80% less energy than traditional hand dryers. The DDM is a small, long-life, low-energy and brushless motor that spins at 1,666 revolutions per second. DDM produces enough air pressure for Dyson Airblade to dry hands without the need for heat.

Cost:
With 500 uses per day, Dyson Airblade will cost businesses less than $100 to operate for 1 year, compared to $400-450 with traditional hand dryers. The cost to operate a restroom with paper towels can be 50 times more than one with Dyson Airblade.

Dyson Airblade is being used in AMC theaters and other locations across the US. It is priced at $1,400. To learn more about Dyson Airblade, please visit www.dysonairblade.com.

Here’s a video of the Dyson Airblade in use, drying your hands and killing all sorts of British germs. Suzy from Shiny Shiny demos it for us, showing how it dries your hand like the car wash dries your car.

The one thing we found kind of disgusting is the bowl of water everyone needs to stick their hands into in order to get their hands wet to test the drier. That bacteria-killing function better work!

One Minute Review: Dyson Airblade. Strike 2 [Shiny Shiny]

The Airblade is a hand dryer developed by Dyson in the UK. It pumps out air at 400mph to completely dry hands in about 10 seconds.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have any added sanitation gain over the current, useless hand dryers. The existing dryers use warm air, which people say kill germs—but the air clearly isn’t hot enough to really kill much of anything. I was thinking that maybe this 400mph air field was enough to complete that task, but it apparently isn’t either.

At first this seemed like a pretty wonderful invention, but now I’m not so sure. I guess Purrell is still the champion of misophobes everywhere.

Dyson goes 400mph in toilet [The Sun via Gizmodo]