Digital music players have gotten smaller and sexier this holiday season, hidden in gold necklaces, tucked into sweaters, and squeezed into earpieces for swimmers.
The market for flash cards that store everything from text and photos to music has blossomed this holiday shopping season, with companies offering ever more novel products in the fiercely competitive digital music business.
Apple’s iPod remains at the forefront of the market, but its rivals are making up in creativity what they lack in stroage space.
Digital product maker BenQ is selling the Joybee, a music player small enough to be worn around the neck. The 4,1cm wide player can store 30 songs and comes in orange, green and purple.
Jens of Sweden offers a more upscale necklace, a 24-carat gold MP-400 player that looks like a tiny gold bar. The musical necklace costs more than $1 000 and can carry more than 200 songs.
Britain’s Gadgets.co.uk is also selling a music-playing necklace, the round, 4,2cm wide, 15g Disc-O Music Player with 128MB.
Running and swimming has never sounded so good, either.
Joggers can run around the block listening to tonnes of music with Nike Philips’ Mp3Run, which has a podometer and 256 MB.
Finis promises to ”make your swim rock” with its SwiMP3 player, which allows swimmers to listen to their favourite tunes as they take laps.
”The SwiMP3 uses bone conduction — the direct transfer of sound vibrations from the cheek bone to the inner ear — to provide the swimmer with exceptional sound clarity,” the company says in its website.
Even sunglasses sing with Oakley Thump, shades with their own MP3 with 128 MB or 256 MB and earpieces.
Comic book cat Garfield is also plugged in. A stuffed Garfield sold in the United States includes an MP3 and earpieces that are attached to the cat’s back.
Clothing giant Gap is offering a winter sweater that includes a radio in its chest pocket with earpieces incorporated into the hood. But there is no reason to worry about cleaning it, since the earpieces pop off before stuffing the sweater into the washer.
Even the Swiss Army knife has been given a technological makeover, as Victorinox is offering a pocket knife with the traditional blade, scissors and nail file but with a new addition: a computer card.
In its website, the company bills it as a pocket knife for ”computer users on the move.” The product was developed with Swissbit AG.
The card, which plugs into a computer, holds 64 MB of text, music, photo or video files. – Sapa-AFP