iPod accessories
Nothing sucks the joy from a morning jog like earbuds that will not stay in, or whose materials creak and groan with your movements.
Earbuds are also dangerous to cyclists. Sensory deprivation is never a good thing when you are subject to the whims of road-raging “death monsters’’ (cars, that is) and jaywalkers.
Leave it to Japanese industrial designers, then, to come up with a portable speaker as safe as it is cute.
The Music Balloon, from Yuen’to Design, is not what I would call elegant, although using it beats carrying around a boom box, a la Radio Raheem, or fixing one to your handlebars with a bungee cord.
Simply enough, the Music Balloon is a colorful foam ball, about 2 inches in diameter. Its output is 0.7 watts, so your musical space is unlikely to get far beyond the personal.
The Music Balloon comes with an audio cable you can plug into your iPod Nano or another device, such as your mobile phone. The sponge ball speaker comes in green, black, yellow, green and red, depending on where you find the 2-inch ball online.
The Music Balloon also has a USB dongle for recharging. Play time on the speaker is a little over four hours. It will take you two hours to fully recharge the device.
Yuen’to is known for its quirky gadgets. You might recall the company’s mug-shaped speaker (www.idea-in.com/yuento/product/musicmug/index_en.html) for the iPod. Other inventions from the kawaii-on-steroids ID company include a manual paper shredder with a hand crank and a colorful shell and an aroma diffuser shaped like a Jonathan Adler vase.
You can find Music Balloon for about $45 at the A+R Store (aplusrstore.com/product.php?id=470).
Mobile phones
Fuse: a cellular phone for the future
A year ago, if you had asked what mobile phones will look like in the future, I would have told you to look to the tricorder, the multisensing and recording device in “Star Trek.’’But since I have seen Synaptics’s new concept phone, the Fuse, I am thinking more along the lines of the half-flesh, half-machine devices in director David Cronenberg’s disturbing flick “Videodrome.’’
That is because the Fuse (www.synaptics.com/fuse) does such a clever job of detecting your every move, making it more an extension of your body than a touch-screen device.
Synaptics will demonstrate the Fuse in January at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
The Fuse looks like an iPhone; it was wrapped in a protective and shapely silicone jacket. But virtually every part of the Fuse, inside and out, senses your touches, tilts, and squeezes.
To navigate through menus on the Fuse you can touch the screen, drag a finger along its borders, or grip the sides of the handset and tilt it back and forth.
You can even draw a finger along the back of the Fuse to select menu items on the front screen.
Synaptics created the Fuse with the industrial design firm TheAlloy (www.thealloy.com), a software developer called the Astonishing Tribe AB (www.tat.se), and the touch-feedback mechanism maker Immersion Corp. (www.immersion.com).
Texas Instruments (www.ti.com) provided the Fuse’s mobile device processor.
