CES 2015

Parrot yet again gets us all excited with the potential of a new and innovative pair of headphones. The Parrot Zik Sport are sweat-proof wireless Bluetooth headphones that not only play your music, but they track your heart rate, your steps taken, the amount of bounce in each stride, how long each foot is in contact with the ground, as well as how much external noise you’re blocking out with the active noise canceling. The Zik Sport have a unique looking design that includes rubberized stability pads as well as an accelerometer and electrical heart rate sensors. All of this data is tracked through an included app.

Parrot claims that the usable battery life for the Zik Sport will be around 8 hours when fully charged and using the data collection mode, longer (they estimate up to 15 hours) if it’s just music that you’re streaming.

Here’s the catch: the model shown to us at CES is only a work in process. Parrot says the release is planned for sometime late 2015. So how well the system will work, how much they will cost, how well they will fit (and stay put during rigorous running), and how good they will sound are all a matter of speculation at the moment. But, based on innovation alone, the design and ideas are unique, something we’ve come to expect from the folks at Parrot. Here’s hoping that they will be released soon, and be as fantastic as the prototypes made them seem. For now, we’ll just have to watch www.parrot.com/usa/ and wait for more announcements.