RCA Jet Stream, Kleer wireless headphones hit the FCC

We got a chance to check out RCA's Jet Stream MP3 player and accompanying Kleer wireless headphones way back at CES in January, but it looks like they've both now finally landed in the FCC's hands, which means we should be seeing an actual launch before too long. The player itself is a pretty basic deal, with a tiny OLED screen, 1GB of storage, an FM tuner, and a promised 12 hours of battery life -- not to mention a less than eye-catching design. The real interest is in the headphones (check 'em out after the break), which use Kleer's proprietary technology instead of Bluetooth to wirelessly shoot tunes over a distance of 5 to 6 feet. As we found out for ourselves at CES, the quality turned out to be surprisingly good, with no interference even in a place flooded with RF signals. What's more, assuming nothing has changed in the past few months, you can expect to pay just $129 for the combo. Still no official word on a release date though.

Read - RCA Jet Stream FCC filing
Read - Kleer headphones FCC filing

[Sam @ Oct 3rd 2007 11:51AM]

Too little, too late. I'm waiting on the Samsung P2. I already have some Bluetooth headphones I like.

[dcny @ Oct 3rd 2007 11:57AM]

i'll take a zune before even thinking about this

[Mike @ Oct 3rd 2007 12:00PM]

Well, I was going to buy one, until I saw the pic of the headpones... I thought there wasn't going to be a wire?

[Jason @ Oct 3rd 2007 12:06PM]

I believe the second wire is the charger

[Alex @ Oct 3rd 2007 12:08PM]

I think what he's referring to is the wire between them, in which case I second the motion.

If they had earbuds like in the preview and some sort of kit that you could slap on to an iPod I'd be all over this.

[Anthony @ Oct 3rd 2007 12:25PM]

They're so small though. I would be concerned about losing one of them if they weren't tethered in some fashion. However, I'm happy w/ my Nokia BH-500, even w/ a wire as it lets me use my Shure headphones.

[fmobus @ Oct 3rd 2007 5:20PM]

This is rather pointless w/o Blue Tooth. There is already plenty of options of Blue Tooth head phones, but all of them seem to be locked to a specific cell-phone / mp3-player.

I don't know much about the Blue Tooth protocol inner workings but, in my dreams, Blue Tooth gadgets should be a modular architecture, i.e. object-oriented. For instance, one headset's features can broken down to implementations of AudioOut, AudioIn, CallReceiver, CallEnder "interfaces". If those interfaces are well defined and stable (the main problem with our industry nowadays), any vendor could offer gadgets that play out with different products, say an iZune, a cell-phone, etc.

A hypothetical device I would kill for today is a simple Blue Tooth audio emitter that could connect to standard headphones jack, paired with a head phone that could reproduce the audio sent by this emitter. I bet there is already something like this for the iPod crowd, but what about us lowly any-other-mp3-player owners?

[fmobus @ Oct 3rd 2007 5:49PM]

strike my last. Bluetooth kinda works like this, with its Bluetooth profiles

[rdow @ Oct 3rd 2007 5:48PM]

Weeks too late. The updates on this started coming out September 20th... Gizmodo on 9/22. Supposed to be at Walmart very soon.

Hint to Engadget, setup Google News alerts. You may not beat the competition but you'll be a little more timely

[Drew @ Oct 4th 2007 2:02PM]

Go to their website, it comes in tethered and non-tethered. They apparently have references for different applications already. The innovation isn't wireless headphones, it's wireless headphones with usable battery life.