Oh My God!

I had one of those "oh my god!" moments at the NTT DoCoMo booth at Communicasia in Singapore this week. Communicasia is the largest telecom exhibition in Asia and all of the key players display their wares.

Can you guess what this man is doing sticking his finger in his ear? He is listening to a cell phone call through his finger. I did it myself and it is weird hearing sound through your finger because your brain is tuned to not listen when you have your finger in your ear. So how does it work? The sound waves are transported from the phone in your pocket to the the ring like device on the finger that you see in the picture, then through your finger bone to your ear. There is also a microphone in the ring for speaking (and you can leave your finger in your ear and talk at the same time). I told the Docomo booth with astonishment "I salute you!" And then I began thinking--who would use such a device? There are blue tooth devices that are as small as big hearing aids that can fill the same function. Anyway, Docomo said that they are trying to shrink this device to make it more commercially feasible. Release date not known. Beware of engineers: they can come up with brilliant things with little use.