Oakley have already had one crack at producing a set of MP3 sunglasses, this original Oakley Thump got mixed reviews from most of the press including ourselves, so how will the revised Oakley Thump Two's fare? First up the design seems a bit more contemporary and as sunglasses they are a bit more in keeping with something you might purchase and wear. Gone are the frankly ridiculous flip up lenses that made the old Thump model too geeky and now the whole style is more snowboard than circuit board.

The Thump 2's are quite weighty and the first time you put them on its clear that they are not for the shy retiring type, these say look at me and believe us people will, even without realising that they are more than just a pair of shades. The dark black plastic looks quite nice and the wrap around style make them reasonably comfortable even when wearing them for prolonged periods, we did note that they do obscure peripheral vision making them less suitable for driving or for use on a bike.

Styling is only half the story with the Oakley Thump range, the main selling point is the integrated MP3 player. The frame houses up to 1gb of audio files in solid state storage, the controls for the player are mounted in the top of the frame, on the right hand side are the playback controls (power on / off, play, skip forward / back) and on the left hand frame you can select the volume level. You can control a bit more than is obvious from the button markings, if you delve into the instructions its possible to play folders of music stored on the Thump's and to skip by folders or groups of 10 tracks at a time. The earphones are mounted on little arms which descend from the frame, these are adjustable and we managed to get a comfortable position fairly quickly, they do not provide a fantastic seal but are sufficient to ensure the bass sounds meaty enough.

We'd have concerns that the range of movement of the earphone arms may mean not all wearers can fit the earphones if you have a particularly wide head they could fall just short meaning that either you get a very weak sound of perhaps in extreme cases no sound at all!  However no such issues for us they fitted like a dream and we were soon ready to fill up our Thumps with music. This is achieved via a small mini USB socket in the arm of the glasses which is protected by a rubber plug. Hook this up to your PC or Mac and the Oakley's present themselves as some USB mass storage. The USB 2.0 connection is certainly speedy enough although our first use required a PC reboot to get full speed, this was a little strange as we had not needed to load any drivers, nor are you meant to do so.

Soon we had plenty of audio tracks loaded onto the 1gb of storage, these were a mixture of the supported formats, ranging from MP3, WMA, WAV and the iTunes ACC format which is rare for devices outside of the iPod range. Playback is sequential and controlled by a simple forwards or backwards selector, power up the Thumps and you hear a couple of "thumps" to indicate power on, plus a very small LED inside the frame also shows power status.

Audio quality is actually quite good, at least comparable to the other flash players we have in the office, with the earphones firmly placed in ear the bass is present if not as thumping as we'd hoped for. The midrange is accurate and the top end possibly a bit bright for our tastes, it was all a bit tricky to test with some of the strange music left on the Oakley's by previous reviewers. yes you know who you are! thanks for the weird collection raging from "the good old boys" to Prince.

Power is provided by a 150mAh battery which is charged via the USB in around 3 hours with a 1 hour fast charge giving about 80% capacity. In our daily use we managed to get around 5 hours replay form a full charge which is really quite disappointing, Oakley only claim 6 hours playback time and we do feel that this is a shortcoming of what is essentially a flash based MP3 player when the competition boast at least 10 hours.

Pricing for the Thump 2 varies according to the storage amount, you do have to remember that the Oakley brands carries a high price tag before you even add the MP3 technology. So be prepared to pay around £230 for the 512mb version and over £300 for the 1gb model.

Overall the Thump 2 is an improvement on the original Thumps, they are less geeky and better styled, audio support for the iTunes format is a great move and we found them more comfortable to wear. Still the battery life disappoints and the high price tag makes the Oakley Thump 2 sunglasses an expensive style statement for the geek who has money to burn.

Published - 26/02/2006

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