14 DAY TRIAL // The title may sound silly; nevertheless, it couldn't be closer to reality: Yanko Design have made a prototype portable speaker which can be covered in a piece of cloth like a sock. And hanged to your backpack, belt, bike handles or? whatever. The goal of such a thing? Yanko Design claims that this speakers will continuously play your "theme song" as you go hiking or riding or again? whatever.
Now, this isn't such a bad idea after all, but I just guess that hearing the same tune over and over again while climbing a mountain and barely catching my breath would rather make me extremely nervous and will finally lead to either throwing the sock-speakers in a XXXX or smashing it with an axe.
On the conceptual side, the speaker is quite a little marvel: it is shaped like a sphere while the two composing hemispheres can rotate and thus controlling the volume. The lower one houses the small speaker which in the hanged position will obviously face downwards while the upper one is hollow and contains the covering sock and the hanging nylon strap.
Now it doesn't mean that the small spherical speaker must hang all the time: just stuff the strap and the sock inside the empty hemisphere and you'll get a musical ball, or something like that. Still, Yanko Design has not released any further specs on the speaker itself, such as type and size of the memory within (it must be flash, anyway), connectivity and operation specs (battery, runtime and so on).
What I really liked best was the fact that the volume control was actually properly embedded in the whole structure: if Yanko hadn't printed a symbol for volume, I guess lots of people would have looked quite some time for the knob... Anyway, the way things are now is awesomely cool as the roundness of the whole thingie is retained and the symmetrical opposite pole-cuts (for speaker and sock) are actually adding class.
Even if I didn't carry this speaker in my trips on the mountain, nor tie it to my motorbike, I guess I'd buy one or two to play some terrible pranks and annoy my friends. Still waiting for the price, Yanko!
