October 18, 2005
Wires and the wearability problem
I picked up an iPod Nano as a birthday gift to myself, and love it. It's small and light enough to fit in my shirt pocket, and I'm finding that even 2 Gig is enough for a wide range of my randomly-sampled music library (plus podcasts, which is really what I want to use it for).
The one big problem I have with it (besides still needing to buy some sort of sleeve to protect its screen) is what to do with the headphones when I'm not using it. The ones that come with it are always a tangled mess after sitting in my pocket, and the Javo Edge retractable kind seemed fine on my normal iPod but now actually takes up more room and is twice as thick as the iPod itself!
The problem of "what do you do with it when it's not being used" is one that watches and belt-clip pagers have solved but iPods and cellphones headpieces really haven't yet. Even wireless earpieces for cellphones don't have a place when they're not in use, though at least they don't get tangled. It's a harder industrial engineering problem than you might think, and one that I think often gets overlooked.
Posted by bug to Wearable Computing at October 18, 2005 8:38 PM
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I bought the Javo Edge retractable headphones after hearing about them from you. I'm sorry to say that they only lasted me about 3 months before one of the headphones started to cut out. Retractable cables are necessarily thin and thinly shielded, and the constant wear and tear I put them through was too much, apparently.
I haven't found any good solution either. I tend to wrap the headphones around the iPod Mini, or a belt clip, if I have one.
Posted by: Rawhide at October 18, 2005 8:43 PMYeah, one of the earpieces in mine just cut out too, which is why I'm using the tangled mess again. Even so though, the Javo feels like it's even bigger than the Nano itself!
Posted by: Bug at October 18, 2005 11:21 PMJust had a brain-fart about this issue.
Braid/weave several strands of thin yarn along the length of the cable. Take a piece of hook-side velcro and "coil" the yarn-covered-cable on the surface. That should take care of both the tangling (the velcro keeps everything stationary) and the mechanical wear (the braid takes up the mechanical stress).
If you encorporate this into the case then you also have a way to manage extra cable length - stick it to the velcro. If you need to secure the cable to clothing (because you're moving around a lot), just use more strips of velcro.
Enjoy!
Posted by: Andrew at October 27, 2005 12:33 PMOoh, interesting idea -- I'll have to try that out. If you can bear covering the mirror-like finish, could even attach the hook-side velcro directly to the back of the nano and then use it to stick the nano to your vest when it's being used.
Posted by: Bug at October 28, 2005 12:40 PM