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Motorola O ROKR - another sun glasses boost

Over at Motorola, after Oakley turned out a success, they assigned high priority to that direction of commercial development, therefore we could witness launch of a new headset for ROKR line-up with the corresponding label. Most likely the “O” letter in the marketologists’ minds is strongly associated with connection to the cooperating company and to a rapt exclamation. A very uncommon marketing move, which, on one hand, makes you believe that the sun glasses are compatible with only one product family, though in reality they can be applied to any handset supporting A2DP Bluetooth profile. An important notice – you are free to use them as a standard headset not a tool for listening to music, with any phone. The development of RAZRWIRE’s concept proceeded further, so now the accessory has two earphones on-board, a built-in battery with nonseparable construction. The sun glasses are pretty heavy, as their weight is 55 grams. The manufacturer claims use of “light” materials and patented knowledge O Matter. From my point of view, the glasses are quite comfortable, but light on no account. Owing to weight distribution over the construction, though, it’s not that vital, as you will hardy notice their heaviness.

As you remember, on RAZRWire I managed to replace the default lenses with the new ones, matching the form, yet with several diopters on them. However these sun glasses won’t allow you to perform the same trick. The main used material is plastic – even the pads at the bridge are made of plastic rather than rubber. Though, if you put some efforts in searching for rubber, you will eventually find it on the ends of ear arms. There is only a single color scheme available for these glasses – a black one, furthermore they possess somewhat original design, reminding of Terminator I, and owing to the color this similarity becomes almost obvious. I won’t even try to rate this parameter, since it’s a very subjective one, so you have to decide it for yourself, as for me, the form didn’t appeal to my liking.

The earphones are firmly fixed on the ear arms; nonetheless each one has three joints, hinges and is easily rotated in two dimensions. This allows people with bigger head to use the sun glasses effectively. The headphones perfectly fit ear and should you find them somewhat inconvenient, you can always adjust them in two-three seconds. Having fixed the earphones, you will find out that now there is no way sun glasses will fall from your head, even if you intend to do it by moving sharply.

The lenses adopt coated optics technology – HDO. In my humble opinion those lenses, found in RAZRWire are of better quality, though I cannot see any reason, serving as a basis for this – may be it’s due to the frame form or something else, I’m not sure.

The lower part of the right ear arm holds a miniUSB-port, which actually charges the battery of this accessory. Full recharging time is a bit less than an hour. The incorporated Li-Ion battery remains good for up to 100 hours in standby mode and nearly 4 hours in operating mode. We managed to squeeze 3 hours and 40 minutes from our unit. When using this device as a common headset without attempts to playback some music in them, the will last for 2-3 days, in case you spend 40-45 minutes on conversations per day.

Each ear arm features three rubberized buttons on the top, which stand for adjusting volume, pick/hang up functions. On the right – rewind, play and pause keys. The sun glasses are easily connected to any handset supporting A2DP profile without any nuisances – all options work in a proper way: you can jump from one track to another, rewind songs etc. Apart from this, the accessory performs as a full-range handsfree set, providing possibilities for voice dialing and other commonly used functions.

A service indicator is located on the internal side of the right ear arm and offers two backlighting colors. A hilarious fact – I failed to locate the position of the microphone, yet my voice was transmitted on a very high level.

Supported Bluetooth profiles:

A2DP-Sink
AVCTP
AVDTP
AVRCP-Controller
GAVDP
Generic Access
HandsFree-Unit (1.0)
Headset-HS
Serial-DevA
Serial-DevB

The sunglasses have no direct rivals on the market and will attract gadget-lovers for sure, yet absence of trim choice and high price (on the level of 330-360 USD) closes the door to the mass market even in high-end segment, in other words the accessory will occupy a very specific niche unlike RAZRWire. Though, I will admit the fact that the first version of the sun glasses appeals to me more that its successor - mainly owing to lenses quality, cutting-edge design and assembling quality.

Video clip which shows sun glasses and headset (wmv, 5.97 Mb)>>>