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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.
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.
... 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
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.
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.