Look cool and listen to great music at the same time
Bose Frames
£199.95, bose.co.uk
Every so often a gadget comes along and reminds me that, yes, we really are living in the future.
I might not be commuting to work via jetpack and fighting off hordes of radioactive mutants, as I imagined I’d be doing when I was ten, but I can at least now wear sunglasses that are also headphones.
The Bose Frames are far better than they have any right to be, with very decent sound. You’ve still got ‘open ears’ to hear important things going on around you, like car horns and your wife bellowing up the stairs to ask where she put her hair brush.
The Bose Frames are far better than they have any right to be, with very decent sound
And you can also terrify nearby people by holding conversations with thin air, as the Frames have a built-in mic for hands-free calls.
The Bluetooth device uses ‘open ear acoustics’ – two tiny speakers sited just over your ears. To people near you, they’re almost silent.
Cleverly, Bose has avoided most of the mistakes Google made with its ill-fated Glass ‘smart glasses’ – mistakes that led to wearers being labelled ‘glassh*les’ and banned from bars in California. There’s some smart tech here (you can turn the glasses off by turning them upside down), but there’s not too much of it: no little screens and, crucially, no cameras. That helps the battery last for up to three-and-a-half hours per charge.
Cleverly, Bose has avoided most of the mistakes Google made with its ill-fated Glass ‘smart glasses’
There are a few basic ‘augmented reality’ apps, which offer audio directions or golf tips using GPS, but these are merely a sideshow.
The cool bit is simply that you can listen to music without having huge headphones (or those little Apple toothbrush heads poking out of your ears). You just look like a cool dude wearing shades – at least, that’s what everyone else thinks.