Tech keeps shrinking. An MP3 player now fits in your wallet. The Israeli company Walletex Microelectronics has reduced a full-fledged music machine to the size of a credit card, less than a tenth of an inch thick, and says it's durable enough to carry alongside your MasterCards and Visas.
The Wallet MP3's controls are rudimentary–no LCD here, with buttons to skip forward or backward to another track and for volume control. I'm no audiophile, but the music sounded good over a pair of earphones during a brief demo at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The phones plug into a USB adapter, which is also for connecting to a PC to download songs and recharge the battery. A Walletex spokesman said the battery should last for a day's worth of music.
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| COURTESY OF WALLETEX |
Look for the players to arrive sometime this summer, with capacities of 256 megabytes to 2 gigabytes. Pricing hasn't been announced, but they'll most likely sell at a premium–Walletex is already selling plain storage drives for the wallet, with 128 MB cards costing about $25. At that price, a typical USB thumb drive would have at least 10 times the storage. But groundbreaking shrinking always comes at a price.
And despite the durability claims, I'm guessing they're not meant for back-pocket wallets.
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