Sunglasses player not a bargain

And if Oakley's new breed of eyewear, dubbed Thump, retailed for about $100, it might be a tempting alternative to some of the rudimentary flash memory card music players on the market.

But these supershades cost $395 for a pair with 128 megabytes of memory and $495 for the 256-megabyte version, which sports polarized lenses. With typical audio compression rates, that means the larger version holds roughly 64 four-minute songs.

The Thump works with both Microsoft Windows-run personal computers and Apple Macintosh (news - web sites) PCs. It comes with a custom-size USB cable (it uses the faster USB 2.0 standard) that plugs into a computer just like any removable drive.

Users can swap music in WMA, MP3 or WAV formats by simply dragging and dropping files to the virtual Thump folder using the operating system's file management software. There is no support for playlists, or even for shuffle.