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US Military Issuing iPod Touches To Soldiers
644bd346996 writes "Newsweek has an article about the latest weapons in the US military's arsenal. The iPod Touch and the iPhone are being adapted as general purpose handhelds for soldiers in the field. 'Apple gadgets are proving to be surprisingly versatile. Software developers and the US Department of Defense are developing military software for iPods that enables soldiers to display aerial video from drones and have teleconferences with intelligence agents halfway across the globe. Snipers in Iraq and Afghanistan now use a "ballistics calculator" called BulletFlight, made by the Florida firm Knight's Armament for the iPod Touch and iPhone. Army researchers are developing applications to turn an iPod into a remote control for a bomb-disposal robot (tilting the iPod steers the robot). In Sudan, American military observers are using iPods to learn the appropriate etiquette for interacting with tribal leaders.'"
They're military, they might not even necessarily have to obey any EULA.
In theory, the feds could invoke eminent domain and force Apple to sell the IP rights if necessary.
So Apple has every incentive to be accommodating to their needs...
But most likely they just buy the DISTRIBUTION certificates from Apple, as any developer could, so they can sign and deploy their own apps on their own without necessarily having to put anything on the app store.
Not all apps are necessarily public.
Apple has an enterprise program. You buy the $299 dev licence, and you can install to your own company/platoon/whatever's devices.
Er... You know that Apple officially supports "Enterprise apps" on iPhone? Which is to say, privately developed apps available on an intranet "App Store". The bonus here is also that these apps do not require Apple approval, just the appropriate develpment licenses.
Next time do a little research before getting sarcastic.
The right spelling is Gandhi.
Correct. I am a retard.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
This kind of case is what the iPods get put in. I'd say they're probably close enough to mil spec that it makes the iPods clearly more cost effective. It's not like iPods are particularly fragile to begin with - once you protect them from moisture and sand, the only significant vulnerability that remains is the touch screen itself, which is easily protected with a flip cover. I doubt that temperature is much of an issue, given that they are all solid-state devices.
Another example of an enclosure is this one, for the first-gen touch, shown at the bottom of the page with an attached sniper rifle. This is clearly one of the best-protected iPods in the world. If you read more on that site, you'll see that they have done plenty of testing to ensure that the iPod can survive the shock of the attached rifle being fired numerous times.
You may remember that, in the earlier days of the Iraq war, soldiers would write home begging for their families to send them Talkabout FRS radios. Yup, those little handheld radios sold in blister packs at Wal-Mart for camping trips.
Those things are, doubtless, less secure, less durable, less resistant to interference, and less powerful than purpose-built military communications systems would be. However, they had one big advantage: they were available to the soldiers when they needed them.
If the military has trouble getting a mature technology like handheld radios into the hands the troops, you can bet that they'd flub something like handheld computers even worse. Sometimes, it's better to just buy the darned things at Wal-Mart.