[Editors’ Note: On November 1, 2006, iLounge published The 2007 iPod Buyers’ Guide, with more than 30 brand new, capsule-sized product reviews – only for products we considered to be amongst the very best we’ve seen throughout the year. The short review below is excerpted from the Guide, which you can download here.]
The single most impressive thing that Scosche has done with BlueLife – a series of $200-250 Bluetooth 1.2 audio kits – is to deliver a complete vision for a wireless iPod future: the $200 Headphone Kit competes with FreePulse and the naviPlay Stereo Headset Kit, while separate $250 In-Home and In-Car Kits turn home stereos and many car stereos into wireless Bluetooth receivers.
Hook up everything and your iPod can go wirelessly from portable to in-home to in-car use. But pricing, comfort of the headphones, size of the iPod pack, and BT1.2 are issues – a BlueLife 2.0 could be huge.
(From our earlier First Look: Sold in three versions – the Complete Kit with headphones, transmitter, and iPod parts ($200), a Sport version without the iPod parts ($175), and a lower-priced Wireless Headphones only set ($130) – Scosche’s Bluelife Headphone Kit system enables you to transmit wireless audio from any iPod to the wireless headphones using the Bluetooth 1.2 standard.
The components in this set are also compatible with the company’s Bluelife car and home integration kits, as well as Bluetooth-ready cell phones, allowing you to take your iPod from home stereo to car stereo to portable use with a single battery-powered transmitter pack. A microphone in the headphones pops out to let you interrupt iPod audio automatically with cell phone calls.
