BUSINESS ERA

Face it – making noise by hitting stuff is fun, which is why Rock Band flew off the shelves despite the high price. Roland are cashing in on this craze with two new products – the HD-1 entry level electronic drum kit and the DT-HD1 drum trainer software.

Roland drum kits are well regarded and the HD-1 has all the usual toys you’d expect from a modern instrument – velocity sensitive pads, MIDI interface etc. No real surprises there except it’s compact size. The thing that caught my attention was the training software.

Reading music is hard work so the guitar hero / Rock band games introduced a much simplified method of displaying musical notation on the screen. Roland have now adopted that approach in their training software – the practical upshot of this is that people who get interested in the drums through the video games (and there will be quite a few of those) will feel right at home when they transition to a grown-up kit. The software also offers a more traditional musical notation and has a range of options including jamming with a backing track.

source:coolest-gadgets

While I was at CES Unveiled, I managed to see a product that I probably would have missed on the showfloor called the Tri-Specs. Tri-Specs are Bluetooth wireless headphones for an MP3 Player or cellular phone that are in the form of sunglasses.

At the ends of the Tri-Specs are two retractable earbuds that the user can put in his or her ears, which automatically turn the Tri-Specs on when extended. The best part is that no one would ever know that you are wearing earbuds while you wear the Tri-Specs glasses. You could be listening to MP3s while you’re supposed to be listening to the human resources director talk about some needless thing. Unless they look closely, your supervisors would never know.

The phone and volume controls are located conveniently on one side of the frame, and the MP3 controls are on the other side. In addition to the manual controls, the Tri-Specs can also accept voice commands with the STEPvoice software that can recognize the user’s voice from others, as well as outside noises.

I was amazed at the design of the shades, because fashion was not sacrificed for functionality. In other words, the sunglasses look like actual sunglasses and not an MP3 Player pretending to be sunglasses.

The Tri-Specs should be available now for a price of $199.99, in colors of black, white, silver, blue, black metallic, as well as black and white combo.

source:coolest-gadgets