Wearable Cell Phones Are Here

An anonymous reader writes "BusinessWeek Online just ran an article on wearable cell phones. A cell phone in a powder case? In a wrist watch? Inside your earring? Sure, why not. And these phones could make it into the U.S. in the next year."

Comments

Tin foil hat...

[cbrocious]

You gotta wonder if these will be small enough to be able to be given to people as presents to spy on them. "Wow, these are beautiful earrings! Thank You!" "No, thank YOU!"

Perhaps a privacy concern for the future.

Seems like a good idea

[Dizzle]

The idea of putting a finger in your ear would improve audio quality, would it not? I mean, when you plug your ear with your finger, it blocks out everything but low frequency sounds for the most part. Couldn't that make conversations, even in loud places, quite feasible?

Just a little sidenote: what answer is that stupid guy expecting to his question? "Nope, can't hear you now." That's like saying "Whoever's not here, raise your hand." or "Are you asleep?"

Re:Beam Me Up Scotty

[obeythefist]

I have a smartphone. My PDA is my phone. My web browser is my phone. My camera is my phone. My MP3 player is my phone. One 266MHz device, one battery, all that functionality.

Remember, the gist of the actual article has little to do with wrist phones per sei, rather that these devices are now small enough to be used in such a way, or in wearable clothing, purely to make them more convenient so you don't have to lug as many gadgets around with you.

Of course if you use a PDA and a cellphone for sending SMS's, you probably fit into the 80% of people who are going to keep carrying a lot of baggage and a lot of different batteries for every gadget you have. So basically in order to have the same level of functionality you get from a single handset, you're carrying your handset, a bluetooth headset and a PDA?

Which is fine of course, each to his own, but I'm very happy with the way convergence lets me carry all that functionality in one device.

Re:From the article

[ratsnapple tea]

Yeah, I'm Japanese (born and raised) and my parents taught me to use those beveled wooden sticks to clean my ears. I don't know whether it's safe, but it feels really good. Almost as good as sex.

Of course, my people are also known for their other weirdnesses, such as a religion that believes the spirits of our dead ancestors haunt the streets picking up the shit of the living and eating it. I am not kidding.

Part way there already

[panurge]

I have artilleryman's ear, and I use an in-ear hearing aid. I use a neck microphone (under my shirt) on my cell phone with an inductive loop, so phone speech comes directly into my ear. Unlike a Bluetooth unit, the battery life is weeks. Because the hearing aid is music grade, the sound quality is vastly better than you get with the tiny speakers on cell phones. The result is that I can answer the phone and talk with no visible phone at all. I still derive minor pleasure from the shock of some people watching this madman talking to himself, but the fact is, it works extremely well. The microphone is shielded and has good noise rejection, and on the T setting I can block out external sounds and hear perfectly in very noisy environments. The one thing I would really like is an external keypad I could velcro to a jacket, or a better voice dialing system than the (frankly crappy) Nokia 6310 the company provides.

There are few benefits of middle aged deafness, but this is one of them.

Evil Phones!!

[iR-Corp]

This is a MAJOR problem with privacy, these things are so small you could slip them into a handbag or wallet even and record an entire conversation, and if they have the SUPA COOL video FONE then the Ped's will go ballistic. Screw small phones, i lose mine enough as is. Respec.