Next Generation of MP3 Glasses 178
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.""
Very annoying... (Score:3, Insightful)
Solar battery? (Score:5, Insightful)
In case you didn't realize (Score:5, Insightful)
Just great. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not for geeks (Score:5, Insightful)
... 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.
$500 for Oakley Thumps? (Score:1, Insightful)
Trying to do too much (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:obviously (Score:3, Insightful)
"Dude, you just sat on my glasses!"
Plastic Pocket Protector (Score:3, Insightful)
2 cents,
Queen B.
Not even worth checking out. (Score:5, Insightful)
Somehow, I just don't see these things catching on. They're ugly.
Sweet merciful jesus those are ugly (Score:5, Insightful)
$20 sunglasses + $20 player != $400 status item (Score:4, Insightful)
We want an Open Source sunglass+MP3 player!
Re:Not for geeks (Score:5, Insightful)
No, because I'm not enough of an idiot to wear headphones while riding - hearing's important my friend.
Re:Very annoying... (Score:2, Insightful)
i see two main problems with this:
1. its on a pair of sunglasses - ok its great for outdoors when its sunny, but if you either wear glasses, or spend a good deal of time indoors, or out at night, you can't really use them
now if the mp3 player component was detacheable, or if the frame could be used with prescription lenses that change colour in the sunlight, then we're talking...2. you can't change the earbuds. what happens if you want to replace them with better sounding ones? i guess you could cut the cord and attach new ones onto it, but i'm sure not everyone's willing to perform the surgery.
Re:Not for geeks (Score:2, Insightful)
wearable computing battles aesthetic inertia (Score:3, Insightful)
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
This is just silly (Score:2, Insightful)
Unix highly misunderstood as a child (Score:3, Insightful)
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.