TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Sunglasses That Bring Music to Your Ears

Sunglasses That Bring Music to Your Ears

Monty Solomon (monty@roscom.com)
Fri, 20 Jan 2006 23:37:33 -0500

By WALTER S. MOSSBERG and KATHERINE BOEHRET

Despite their huge popularity, iPods and other portable music players
force people to walk around with wires coming out of their ears.
That's an anachronism in an age when everything is going wireless.
While there are some attachments for the iPod that allow the use of
wireless headphones, both the attachments and the cordless headphones
are bulky and ungainly.

But there's another approach to getting rid of the wires: make the
music player wearable. This week, we tested just such a product -- the
Thump 2 from Oakley Inc., the same company known for its stylish and
expensive sunglasses with the signature "O" imprinted near your
temple. The Thump 2 is a pair of Oakley sunglasses with an MP3 player
and earbuds built into its foldable arms, eliminating the messiness of
dangling cords.

After trying out the Thump 2, we agree that the sunglasses/earbuds
combination works pretty well, is comfortable to wear and operates
rather easily -- using a series of buttons on the top side of each
sunglass arm. But it's very expensive and rather impractical.

The Thump 2 is an improved version of the original Thump that came out
about a year ago. That first version was built on the thinner frames
that you might conjure up when you picture a pair of Oakleys. This
Thump uses shades that have a boxier look.

http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/solution-20060111.html

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