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Next Generation of MP3 Glasses
Doggie Fizzle writes "A review of the Nu Tech Dark Shadow 256MB MP3 Sunglasses shows one of the latest attempts to multitask common items, whether we want it or not. The Oakley Thumps may have come first, but at 3x the cost of Nu Tech Dark Shadows, even frugal geeks can look smooth... From the review: "I am a sucker for any tool or gadget that tries to combine more than one use or function into a single item, but I also have learned from experience that many times such items fail to perform well at any of the tasks they were designed to do.""
Obviously not a Unix person.
From the slashdot article:
or he'd already have known:
The sad part is, you'll have listened to all the songs before the sun goes down.
If you already wear glasses :/
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
This is an interesting item but it is so 1990. The review's comment of "I am a sucker for any tool or gadget that tries to combine more than one use or function into a single item" is exactly why we don't need so many all-in-one items, but instead, mininetworked items.
Why is Bluetooth such a relative failure? My PDA has bluetooth and I use it ALL the time. The problem is that I don't see very many viable, workable, user friendly bluetooth devices.
If I want an MP3 player, what I'd really want is a portable deposit/store/memory bank (SD card is fine), a very tiny MP3 player and a bluetooth set of headphones. I can't find anything of the sort that WORKS.
My bluetooth headset for my phone has TERRIBLE sound quality. The bandwidth for bluetooth should allow for a decent sound in stereo, but the mono headset is just crap. Can anyone recommend a good stereo set of bluetooth headphones that work?
I believe the future of portable music will probably not be the MP3 player, especially as network availability becomes more pronounced. I use Shoutcast on my PDA phone to stream my entire MP3 collection from home as I want to. GPRS at 33.6K is fairly crap quality, but when I am in range of a public WiFi router (my phone has WiFi as well) I can get pretty awesome quality streaming. Nowadays I am near a public WiFi router probably 15% of the time, compared to 5% last year.
Will we even NEED storage or a large bulky scratchable iPod when we can stream terabytes of music in a few years?
Sorry I don't share your enthusiasm, but I don't think you will look smoother, only geekier. I am geeky enough and I don't want to wear it on my face. Besides, the audio actually sucks....what, I had to try it on...common gimme a break!
Seems like this would be the PERFECT product to have a rechargeable solar battery!
these bulbous pieces of shit look dumb on everyone, not just you. So do the oakleys. You are just not going to make a cubic inch of electronics look smooth on a pair of glasses. A product like this will be ready for prime time when you can fit the entire player in the eraser head of a mechanical pencil.
Wanted: Clever sig, top $ paid, all offers considered.
All I want are those x-ray specs I ordered from boy's life 15 years ago.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
So now when I lose my sunglasses (which happens a LOT), I've also lost my 256MB mp3 player? No thanks.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
... even frugal geeks can look smooth...
These are not for geeks, as can be shown by your idiodic comment (who "looks smooth" with a huge box attached to the side of your head?). They are for bikers, runners, and people involved in sports. They are not for a WOW playing geek in his mom's basement.
Ever try to bike through traffic while screwing around with a headphone cable? Probably not. If you did then you would see that there is a huge market for these kinds of devices.
i'm not even a parent, but it'll be like the world is full of teenagers
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Sheesh...does this thing come with a plastic pocket protector, too? Like some of the other posters, it's obvious enough to even the most casual observer that I'm a geek. Do I really need to paste a sign on my forehead? My Treo plays MP3's rather well and can play them through the headset I'm already wearing. Why add ANOTHER set of headphones?
2 cents,
Queen B.
HDGary secures my bank
If I ever see anyone wearing MP3 player sunglasses I'm going to smack them. And this is coming from someone with a Bluetooth headset.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
Somehow, I just don't see these things catching on. They're ugly.
So, where can I get a pair of these Dork Shadow sunglasses?
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
The Toyjust in time for Christmas
Do they expect me to *pay* for the luxury of wearing -- on my face no less -- something that looks like a Geigeresque metal-sheened plastic turd? I would be ashamed to leave the house wearing one of these. I might as well have a sign on my chest that says "Too much money, and no standards" And, to anybody who says these are for cyclists and such. Well. I'm a cyclist, I ride 50+ miles on weekends on a road bike, and I bike to work daily in downtown washington dc in rush-hour traffic. My iPod works *just* fine, and as a bonus, I still get to wear my real glasses, so I can see the taxis that want to annihilate me.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
I think mostly what us nerds object to is the conversion of two commodity "nerd tools" into an overpriced status item.
We want an Open Source sunglass+MP3 player!
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
500 bucks?? That's Frugal???? No thank you...I'll buy an iPod and duct-tape it to the back of my head.
I kill harmless processes for sport
Since we're integrating gadgets, we could place small solar panels on a hat and attach the hat to the glasses. The panels would charge the battery while providing additional sun protection, and it wouldn't look much dorkier than the Oakleys. (How could it?)
Perhaps you could add an layer of tinfoil for the paranoid, and to maximize energy use, mount a small propeller on the hat that would generate wind power when the person is in motion!
What we've got here is a situation where computers have gotten easily small enough to be wearable on a purely practical level, but are still fighting against entrenched aesthetic norms. People hold up cell phones for seemingly hours at a time while walking around, even though they could easily have some sort of hands-free system. People put mp3 players in their pockets and run wires to their head, even though mp3 players could easily be fit somewhere near the ears. One can easily imagine a world in which it would have been cool all along to wear some kind of crazy cyberhelmet, and in that world we would have progressed much further into augmented reality. No use crying over spilled milk, so let's see what's possible with the culture we've got.
One possibility is that the barrier of aesthetic conservativism will be bypassed only once the size gets down to the point where it really is vanishingly small-- where a pair of sunglasses (or a necklace, or a bracelet, or a ring) with a computer in it is indistinguishable from one without. The computers will simply disappear, and the state of the art for most people in wearable computing will be whatever level is the latest to be effectively vanished.
The other possibility (the one which I, and I suspect most of us here, would prefer) is that there will be some new product or class of products that will change the collective aesthetic of our society and allow wearable computers to fully flourish. One entirely reasonable route for such a transformative device would be a pair of computerized sunglasses. Sunglasses are the largest head-mounted device which is a currently acceptable fashion. They are also conveniently close to the ears and even go in front of the eyes; they're perfectly situated to talk intimately with a user.
In order to effect such a transformation, a product would have to be a brilliant innovation either technically or aesthetically-- and probably both. The product under discussion here comes nowhere close to achieving that prerequisite. My guess is that the first mass market computerized sunglasses will be ones which can project some sort of display onto the glass.
<3
If you were my sig, you'd be reading yourself right now.
No, the reviewed item is only $100 or slightly under. It is the Oakley Thump that pops up in the ads at the bottom that is $500. This makes sense given the cost of Oakley sunglasses alone (hence the booming market in "Foakleys", cheap knock-offs), but for $500 you think you'd get at least 1 GB of space.
$100 for decent sunglasses and an MP3 player really isn't bad. Too bad they're ugly. Shouldn't stop poker players from adopting them, however...
Personally I really only wear sunglasses while driving or as a passenger in someone else's car, and just about every car's stereo system sounds better than earbuds. Plus, it's not legal to drive with headphones on (not that anyone would notice) and as a passenger it would make it difficult to communicate with the driver. I suppose they would be nice on a trip with a lot of people, where you may not be able to stand each other's taste in music, and as pointed out above, they would be nice at the poker table (at least until you want to take them off but still listen to the music).
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
This is obviously not a useful item. This is the kind of crap that ends up in those Sharper Image catalogs that they wont stop sending me. Its about as useful as the Simpsons mockery of Sharper Image hardware, the frying pan with a radio in it. Ive been noticing recently that items such as this and the Moto ROKR are consistently inferior to the alternate solution of just taking something and taping an iPod Nano to it. We have some very good music players and some very good other devices, why is it whenever they try to integrate those two together it always ends up in a product vastly inferior to the two original products?
You know, I think people misunderstand the unix philosophy sometimes. It's not that apps do one thing. It's that they're modular, and *interoperate*.
A compiler doesn't do one thing: it does lots of stuff: parsing, translating, optimising, retargetting. But it does that by using other subtools, and by communicating with other parts of the system and libraries etc.
Likewise, there's no reason an app or tool can't play music and videos and download podcasts all in one slick interface. It's just that it shouldn't try to do all that with one huge mess of code, without relying on pre-existing work such as OGG codecs or ID3 tags, or RSS, or GTK/Qt/whatever.
KDE, for instance, is made up of many, many programs, all doing their own specialist things. They share libraries, and classes, and call child programs and expose application functions for scripting via DCOP and DBUS. They use existing technologies and build on them. It's not a single tool by any means; it's a framework of parts. And I think it's the very best example of Unix I've seen in quite a while.