Hendo brings out second hoverboard iteration

Will we ever see hoverboards join bicycles as our favored way of moving about? We may see the day.

Attracting eyes this week among news sites are reports of a Hendo 2.0 hoverboard which has improvements over the original design. This is the second iteration of the hoverboard that was created by Arx Pax in collaboration with skateboarder Tony Hawk.

The company has come up with a limited number of them of them to send to initial Kickstarter backers. Sean O'Kane in The Verge explained:

"This new hoverboard will be making its way to the Kickstarter backers who pledged $10,000 to the company last year." Arx Pax told The Verge that those donors were "mostly small businesses—not individuals—that are looking to open hoverboard parks of their own."

A brief look at the company history: Last year the founders launched Hendo1.0. Among those who got to ride the board was Tony Hawk. Now a new version of the Hendo hoverboard is here and O'Kane said "it has a real skateboard deck this time around, grip tape and all."

Chelsea Regan discussed the second iteration on Friday in uInterview. Something called " Magnetic Field Architecture" technology has been key to the board, as a more efficient way to transmit electromagnetic energy.

JC Torres in SlashGear wrote, "A stronger hover engine, still based on their patented Magnetic Field Architecture or MFA, provides not only more efficient performance but also better balance."

Josh Constine in TechCrunch laid out the ways in which 2.0 is a step up: "The big advancement is that the mag-lev motors are tilted in towards the board to give it traction so you can shift your weight to somewhat steer its direction," he said. Also, the new version has better battery life. Last but not least, it "eliminates the loud whining noise," he said, and there is a remote kill switch in case it slips away from you.

Greg Henderson, co-founder and CEO of Arx Pax, makes note of the Hendo 2.0 not as a simple recreational toy but as a tool, and with a number of possibilities.

Think "moveables," wrote Regan, where "The whole ability to not touch the ground could create a rippling of possibilities in not only transportation but in structural isolation and industrial automation."

Jill Henderson, the other co-founder of Arx Pax, said the stronger engines in 2.0 open up "new possibilities for the way we transport objects and people."

According to CNN, Arx Pax sees the potential in "being able to isolate structures from unwanted movements, which could have huge applications for buildings in Earthquake zones. It would also lead to changes in car assembly, allowing it to no longer be linear and in space to use magnetic tethering devises to grab satellites magnetically."

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