CTIA Gadgets for 2007

The CTIA mobile technology exhibition has just finished up, and a couple of notable items emerged. First off, Able Planet have developed ‘harmonic boost’ headphones which electronically enhance higher-frequency sounds to counteract the effects of natural hearing loss. As people get older, they lose the ability to perceive higher freqencies – a teenager can probably hear frequencies up to about 22kHz, but many adults can’t hear anything above 15kHz. The Able Planet headphones aim to restore some of the signal that you may otherwise be missing. The headphones are also noise cancelling and have a soft clipping feature.

The 22kHz upper limit of human hearing is the reason that standard audio CDs are sampled at a rate of 44.1kHz. According to the Nyquist calculation, in order to accurately digitally reproduce a signal, the sample rate must be at least twice that of the highest frequency being encoded.

Moving on to a new topic (not directly related to music), the technology behind iqzone‘s website is quite interesting. It opens up a new window on the potential of the mobile Internet, and shows how a well-designed site married to a simple concept could really take off. Here, mobile users with a cameraphone can simply take a snap of an item they wish to sell, upload it to the iqzone site and have an ad online within a minute. I would guess that the simplicity of the site will make it a very popular destination for sellers (particularly those with limited wired Internet access).