Dolphin Swimmer MP3 Player

Audio can travel through solids, liquids and gasses. Air’s easy. Water’s harder, but this player has tackled that problem, reckons David Field.

There aren’t many ways to listen to music around water, other than perhaps grabbing some sandwich bags, double sided tape and silicone, sticking in your iPod and making your own waterproof case.

But as we, and indeed Murphy, know, homemade inventions like these always end in disaster.

Thankfully, the Dolphin Swimwear MP3 player makes things far easier. It is engineered - professionally - to be waterproof. There are several versions of waterproof, and the Dolphin conforms to the pleasingly stringent IPX7 specification. We’d think twice about taking them scuba diving with us, for the sake of our ears, but you’ll be fine snorkelling to Bjork, kite surfing to Rage Against the Machine, or listening to tunes the Catholic Church wouldn’t approve of in the shower.

It’s designed to be strapped to the side of a pair of goggles. The included headphones screw down into the unit, putting pressure on a small washer, making the connection watertight. The business-end of the headphones resemble canal phones; the flange keeps water out of your ear. The cable is only long enough to stretch from the side of your head to your ears, and isn’t long enough to rest in a shirt pocket. It’s built for a purpose, after all.

Naturally, there are trade-offs involved to making the entire unit waterproof. The sound through the waterproof headphones is awful; given the option though we’d take low fidelity headphones over broken ones and a fried brain any day. Annoyingly, they end in a 2.5mm plug instead of a 3.5mm plug; however you can get a converter to solve this. Just don’t go back into the water when you do.

Like the new iPod shuffle, the headphone port electrically doubles as a USB connector. It’s the only opening on the unit, other than a hidden seal covered with a ‘Warranty void if removed’ sticker. An included (and only 10cm long) USB to 2.5mm cable connects the Dolphin to a PC, where it acts like a removable 1GB USB drive.

You can drag and drop media files to and from the Dolphin without a media manager in sight. It officially supports WMV and MP3 files, but it also plays back WAV files. AAC and OGG aficionados are out of luck. That’s not really surprising, and not very important either when you consider how cool the device is.