With the official introduction of a couple devices AT&T’s smartphone lineup is now better than ever. The new Nokia E71X brings WiFi, AT&T Navigator, and all of the physical design characteristics you’re used to from the original for just $99.99 with a contract after rebate.
There is also the Samsung Propel Pro, a smartphone running Windows Mobile 6.1. It’s got WiFi, a slide-out full QWERTY keyboard and will be available on April 14 for $149.99 after all your discounts have been applied and your two-year agreement is filed away.
In a big garage-size laboratory in Ford Motor Co.’s sprawling research complex in Dearborn, Mahendra Dassanayake stands beneath a planetarium-like dome that can replicate the sun.
It can surround new cars and trucks with an eye-squinting 5,000 watts of light. Or mimic the fading light of dusk. Or make the room turn black, like a backwoods street where there are no city lights or ambient light from the stars or moon.
In this visual performance evaluation lab — dreamed up by Dassanayake and put into use a little over a year ago — Ford can evaluate new interior and exterior lights in virtually every lighting condition mother nature and the manmade world has to offer.
But the research isn’t just about offering better, cooler lights. Ultimately, it’s about improving fuel economy with more efficient lights, such as those that use light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs.
About 5% of fuel consumption goes directly to power a vehicle’s interior and exterior lights, said Dassanayake, a senior staff technology specialist at Ford. So, more efficient lighting systems, which offer good luminosity with less power, could ultimately save consumers at the gas pump.
Lately, Dassanayake’s lab has focused on the benefits and challenges of LED lights over other forms of bulbs, such as incandescent, halogen or fluorescent versions that generally use a filament that must be heated and gas to create a visible spectrum.
LEDs don’t have a filament that can burn out. Rather, they are illuminated solely by the movement of electrons in a semiconductor material, called a diode, which is a small, long-lasting chip.
Bulbs with light-emitting diodes are about twice as efficient as the other light forms, and usually 10 times more expensive. But Dassanayake said that if the lighting systems of all future vehicles were LED, consumers could save as much as a gallon of gas per week.
“We are not doing LEDs for the sake of LEDs,” he said.
BRASILIA — France has struck a landmark outline accord to sell 36 Rafale fighters for between four and seven billion dollars to Brazil, potentially the first foreign customer for the expensive jet, officials said.
Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva announced on Monday after meeting French leader Nicolas Sarkozy that advanced contract talks were being held, though French maker Dassault Aviation said it did not expect a final accord until 2010.
France has been seeking a foreign buyer for the multi-role combat jet for more than a decade.
A Dassault spokesman said the company hopes to finalize the sale in 2010. Even though no final accord has been struck, a Dassault spokesman in Paris told AFP: “President Lula’s declaration clearly means that the Rafale has won the competition.”
He declined to put a precise value on the deal.
France has provisionally agreed to transfer the technology to be able to build the jets to Brazil. France is also to buy about 10 military transport aircraft Brazil’s air force plans to build with Embraer, the national aircraft manufacturer.
The French company hopes the success will boost its chances in tenders made by India, the United Arab Emirates, Switzerland, Libya and Greece.
Dassault has previously lost export competitions for Morocco, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and the Netherlands.
The Brazil contest has been characterized by fierce lobbying by US group Boeing, which put forward its F/A-18 Super Hornet used by the US Navy and Australian air force, and Sweden’s Saab, promoting its Gripen NG. The rivals had also said they were willing to share technology with Brazil.
Brazil has been concerned by past US vetoes on the export of Brazilian aircraft built with some US components, and the fact the Gripen features a US-made General Electric engine and an Italian-made combat radar.
Throughout its tender process, Brazil has emphasized that full technology-sharing took priority over cost.
Brazil’s Foreign Minister Celso Amorim said the proposed deal would mean Brazil could sell Rafale’s that it makes to the rest of Latin America.
“What’s important for us is to have access to the technology to make this plane in Brazil. That’s what we’re currently negotiating,” Lula said.
Lula said that his country wanted closer military ties with France.
“We are definitively consolidating a strategic partnership we started in 2005,” Lula said in a joint news conference with Sarkozy in Brasilia.
The deal adds to 10 billion dollars’ worth of agreements Brazil has already struck with France to buy five submarines (one to be converted to nuclear power) and 50 military transport helicopters.
Brazil’s only aircraft carrier is a mothballed vessel bought from France in 2000.
Lula, who completes his maximum second mandate at the end of next year, has said he believes Brazil is destined to be one of the great powers of the 21st century.
A country’s “independence also has to be a technological one,” he told reporters.
Brazil’s government wants to give Latin America’s biggest nation military muscle commensurate with its swelling economic and political clout — and its ambitions to win a permanent seat on a reformed UN Security Council.
It also wants the capabilitys to maintain control over its two key resources: its vast Amazon rainforest, and recently discovered offshore oil fields that could make the country one of the world’s top 10 oil producers.
The military transport planes that Brazil is selling, the KC-390, are designed to carry lighter loads than the delayed Airbus A400 heavy military transport plane France is committed to.