Extreme iPod: New iPod & iPod Mini Housings for Extreme Environments

Now, that the iPod Mini can go underwater, allow me to suggest other extreme environments in which iPod/iPod Mini marketing is still an untapped opportunity: Tuff-Stuff, The Ultra Tuff, The Fire-Eater, The Glade iPod, and The Galileo iPod.

Tuff-Stuff

High-impact housings and extra-durable shielding for the earbud cord for industrial environments. A beefy black and construction yellow housing in anti-slip high-impact plastic would certainly help ground and low-height construction workers who want to listen to music while driving 500 ton mega-haulers. One side of the case would have a magnetic strip for convenient placement of nails, screws, or Skol cans.

The Ultra Tuff

An ultra-impact resistent iPod (etc.) housing similar to the above Tuff-Stuff. Marketed toward high-rise construction crews (anyone working above 100 feet), the iPod inside would be encased in a polymer sleeve, which floats like a baggie suspended in a liquid teflon matrix and surrounded by a flexible but ultra-durable carbon fiber outter shell. The unit, if dropped, could survive a fall of several thousand feet, or being run over by small to medium-sized construction equipment. The earbud cord would have a break-away connector similar to the XBox’s game controllers, such that, if the unit were dropped, the cord separates rather than ripping the earbuds from the wearer’s ears. On the top side of the earbud cord (above the break-away) would be a tiny pager button, which, when depressed, would cause the iPod (or housing) to emit a loud dinging for easier retrieval of a dropped unit. (Unit functionality not guaranteed if encased in cement.)

The Fire-Eater

Built for firefighters and smoke jumpers who would rather listen to the Talking Heads than their squad’s radio chatter or the screams of broiling orphans, the Fire-Eater iPod housing would cradle the iPod in a triple-layered enclosure of liquid-cooled polymers that would be heat-resistent up to 4000F degrees. Due to the impracticality of building sufficient heat-shielding on the earbud cord, it would be replaced with a Bluetooth transmitter and Sony-style ear-hook headphones, which wouldn’t require more than minimal heat-shielding as they would remain safely beneath the firefighter’s hood and helmet.

The Glade iPod

A specially designed iPod housing from Glade, the leading manufacturer of room deodorizing devices. As the iPod plays music, an interchangable Glade gelatin scent packet is warmed, releasing the user’s choice of body-odor-masking pleasant scents. A special under-arm-band Glade iPod holding strap would also be available for maximum protection near the sourest spot.

The Galileo iPod

Built to provide nearly unlimited hours of musical enjoyment while performing tedious Extra-Vehicular Activity repairs on the International Space Station or Hubble, the Galileo iPod would be covered with durable velcro on all faces but the front, which would have oversized buttons suitable for pressing by thick space-suited fingers, and the top, where the extra-thick, radiation-shielded Bluetooth transmitter would plug in. Like the Fire-Eater, the Galileo would have Bluetooth-receiving headphones inside an astronaut’s helment.

What truly makes the Galileo ideal for entertainment during a spacewalk is its unique features: 

First, the velcro enclosures, which enable the unit to be stuck easily to current velcro patches on space suits, could be peeled back to reveal DaVinci’s Illustrated Man and a small message similar to that etched into the outter casing of the Voyager probe. A contact-sensitive plate on the Illustrated Man panel would detect when the unit was touched by a solid hand (tentacle, wing, etc.), and immediately begin broadcasting via an internal speaker the greeting as recorded on Voyager.

Next, to facilitate the use of the iPod’s first contact features in the event it is lost and sent drifting through space, the iPod will operate on a nuclear battery of .05 lbs of Plutonium P238, enjoying the longest play time of any MP3 player to date, somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 years.

And, finally, the iPod would have a proximity detector built in. Should the astronaut move beyond a certain range from his base (Space Shuttle, ISS, etc.), the iPod would immediately interrupt its current play list and begin looping the track hard-coded its motherboard, David Bowie’s classic “Major Tom.”

Anyone else have ideas for as yet untapped environments and modifications for the iPod or iPod Mini?

Pariah S. Burke writes for Weblogs, Inc. the Design Weblog and the Magazine Weblog, co-writes the Unofficial Photoshop Weblog, and is a frequent contributor to the Unofficial Apple Weblog.