Emirate Airlines will offer in-flight showers for all first-class passengers starting from October 1st. The Emirates will offer this service on the flight New York-Dubai on their A380 airplanes first. If their program ends up being successful, more Emirate Airlines airplanes will have shower cabins.

The idea is to make flying as comfortable as possible, but the cost for that comes in question. You will need to pay $18,000 to have a shower in a Emirate’s A380 airplane. Because other passenger might take a shower in flight too, the airplane needs to carry 1 ton of water. That means, more fuel will be needed for the Emirate Airlines flights and the carbon cost will be around 50,000lbs per trip.

It’s not really nice to see that one shower in mid-flight will do so much damage to environment but nothing can be done about it. Emirate Airlines plans to install shower cabins in all of their high-class airplanes, and that is 50 A380s.

We still can’t see any pictures but the guys who witnessed the development of A380 say the Singapore Airlines front-end suits will be nothing compared to new Emirate airplanes. Their goal is to deliver the experience of Dubai’s “seven-star” Burj Al Arab hotel. It’s hard to imagine they can do that in airplane, but we will see, money is not an issue here.

Emirate Airlines offers showers because people who travel in first class are extremely rich. Richest 18% in Emirates take more then half the flights. The oil wealth made them ask for more and more when it comes to comfortable travel.

Tags: a380, airbus, airplane, emirates, oil, shower, singapore airlines

The battle over the next generation of DVD format is finally over. At last, Sony emerged as the winner in developing a new recording, rewriting and playback system for HD video.

This is not so surprising though, Toshiba’s HD-DVD knock down has been in the works for some time. We witnessed how five major movie studios decided to take the Blu-ray format: Sony, Walt Disney, Lions Gate Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox and MGM figured out it was best to stick with Sony and Blu-ray.

A small hope appeared when Paramount and Universal decided to go with Toshiba’s HD-DVD format. At that point it seemed to be some chance Toshiba would make a comeback and continue the battle.

Alas, last month Warner Bros. decided to release movie discs in the Blu-ray format only. And that’s where the beginning of the end for HD-DVD happened. I guess there are plenty of you who didn’t saw this coming. It reminds me of VHS and Betamax battle, that wasn’t so long ago.

Blockbuster and NetFlix decided to go with Blu-ray discs, while Wal-Mart said it will sell only Blue-ray DVD’s and hardware. That was the time when Toshiba decided it is enough.
Toshiba announced today that it will not produce any HD-DVD hardware, software and other tools.

This news will make millions of people who bought Toshiba’s HD-DVD players groan. Sometimes it’s just not convenient to be an early adopter.

Tags: blu ray, hd dvd, toshiba hd dvd