Forget space shuttles, nanobots and large hadron colliders, the yardstick for human technological development may just be the Star Trek tricorder. Convention geek jokes aside, a good deal of 20th century sci-fi reveals an innate desire for a platform- and information-agnostic device we can point at anything to learn all about it (for when we visit alien worlds).

NASA managed to re-establish contact in the final days to adjust Skylab’s angle for as smooth a re-entry as possible, and final calculations predicted a trajectory across the Southern Ocean and a sparsely populated tract of Western Australia.

But it’s not just the large clear picture of your flight path the iPhone or iPod Touch can provide. Instead of struggling with a complicated remote control unit, you fly the AR Drone merely by tilting your handheld device in the direction you want to go. There are a few basic touchscreen controls like rise, down and rotate, but the accelerometers inside do the rest.