Audex Jacket - iPod plus phone in your jacket

Friday, July 28, 2006

Listening music with a jacket on presents some serious problems when you have to do normal things like adjusting the volume or selecting the song to play. To solve these kinds of issues Burton partnered last year with Motorola and created the Audex Jacket. This outerwear (designed initially for snowboarders) lets us do all these operations and a lot more via a control panel integrated in the sleeve.

Apart from using it in combination with an iPod the jacket in fact, paired with a compatible Bluetooth phone, can also be used to make or receive calls. With a single touch you can answer the phone (after reading on the control panel the caller ID) and during the conversation your hands will be free thanks to the stereo speakers in the hood and the microphone in the jacket.

A good feature that Burton added is the possibility to make a call simply by pronouncing the name of the person to call in the microphone. Obviously the classic way to make a call (dialing the number on the phone) is still available but with the jacket closed it would be annoying the need to open it just to dial the number and then close it again (yes I’m lazy :-)).

When you are done talking to the phone if you were listening to some iPod music you will automatically revert to listening mode and with the usual one touch you will able to control the music player. The panel is backlighted so the vision will always be perfect.

If you were worrying that washing the jacket would create quite a problem to all the electronic parts Burton thought about this too. The control panel, the microphone and all the other components in fact can be easily removed to avoid any trouble with the washing.

Having listed some of the good features of the jacket let’s turn our attention to some “doubts” that emerged reading its freely available manual. It tells to ‘Be careful not to drop the jacket’ and to never expose batteries to temperatures below 14 degrees Fahrenheit.

Since the product is targeted toward snowboarder I find the first warning tough to respect because even the best snowboarders sooner or later will drop. Obviously a lot of tests were carried out on the jacket before releasing it and it passed them all so it’s not a big problem but what if an hard drop unplugs some wire (some components are wired)?

I can plug them immediately but for a jacket that expensive I would expect a better behaviour. The same could be said for the batteries warning. It’s true that we are talking about some extreme conditions for a lot of users but this product is meant to be used in low degrees conditions so I would expect a little more.

Another point that I would like to briefly touch is the jacket compatibility. It does not support Bluetooth 2.0 (it’s only compatible with version 1.2) but this is due to the advanced stage of designing when Bluetooth 2.0 was released. For the same time reasons the jacket is not compatible with the iPod Shuffle (it accepts a Generation 3 or newer device though).

While the product may not be perfect is a good step toward the integration of the wireless technology in our clothing. Besides it is having a good sale (especially between snowboarders) so I guess that my doubts about those two warning are pretty exaggerated.