Core77

Bang & Olufsen: What are they thinking?

By Rain Noe - September 12, 2007

in Object Culture

Technology writer Kevin Hunt reveals, in his write up of the Beosound 3, what many of us have been thinking for years: Bang & Olufsen designs interesting-looking products that most of us will never own, either because they're too expensive and/or we simply have no use for them.

B&O's Beosound 3 is plain ol' bizarre: it's a portable music player (and FM tuner, go figure) with no hard drive or flash memory--it takes SD cards. It also has no readout or display, making navigation difficult; you can't see what's playing, we guess you're supposed to simply memorize what's on the SD card.

Here's the kicker, this thing will run you US $850.

Remember B&O's glass-encased CD player that you opened by waving your hand in front of? The company, it seems, is out of touch in more ways than one.

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claus

17 years ago

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Another highlight is this Samsung mp3 in disguise for 625ï¿½. back in the 80s and early 90s they had some quite advanced technologies (bidirectional communication, networking) plus jacob jensen. today it's mostly just "chic" and useless... quite sad
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Philip Foeckler

17 years ago

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I've given up long ago on B&O, since they refused to acknowledge the death of the CD, and released a phone that abandoned UI conventions for a dramatically worse user experience.
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Pete

17 years ago

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as an ex employee of B&O...i defend most of their designs to the hilt. but when i first saw this i was thinking David Lewis and crew had lost it (this is a design that has been around for quite a while, so this is old news to anyone that knows anything about it) - bit slow off the mark C77!
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Jasper O waale

17 years ago

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B&O's glass-encased CD player happen to be super not only in design but also in function, it art and hifi dont think anybody who have one think that its what you saying "it's out of touch", you might be right about the Mp3 FM thing, but your surly wrong about the CD player
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mike

17 years ago

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None of that really matters, people buy B&O because its B&O, not for usability. B&O seems to understand that perfectly, i fail to see how they are 'out of touch'. Perhaps you wish they were something they are not, but that is your problem, not theirs.
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