The Hookup Lanyard

If you like to listen to your iPod while walking, you'll know this scenario all too well: You're walking down the street with your earbuds in, and you never hear or feel your phone ringing and therefore miss calls you had wanted to take. Lenntek hopes to change that with its Hookup Lanyard.
 
Cleanly designed and easy to attach, the device plugs into your iPod nano's dock connector and automatically interrupts the music with your incoming or outgoing calls from a Bluetooth-equipped cell phone.
 
The Hookup Lanyard's silver adapter, which matches the second-generation silver nano, is lightweight and easy to wear (or keep in your pocket, if wearing it around your neck isn't your style). Two easily adjustable fabric cords lead into earbuds, and a built-in microphone connects to the bottom of the adapter. On the right side of the extension, a glowing blue button for controlling the device's Bluetooth connection is sandwiched between two volume buttons.
 
Pairing a cell phone with this accessory was extremely easy and required no more than a few button presses. A chime interrupts your music when you receive an incoming call, and you can use the buttons on the Hookup Lanyard to accept the call and control the volume. You can also use the Hookup Lanyard to end calls, but there was so much of a lag that we switched over to our phone instead.
 
The device runs off your iPod's battery and turns the screen on briefly once every minute to preserve the nano's battery power. Although we didn't see a drastic drain in our iPod's battery life, we did turn the backlight off to make it last longer. Unfortunately, when a call comes in, the device doesn't pause the song; it merely mutes the iPod.
 
We tested the Hookup Lanyard on the streets of New York and found the music's audio quality quite good. Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." sounded more than acceptable through the Hookup Lanyard's stereo earbuds, and the sound quality was even a step above the earbuds that come with your iPod.
 
We wish we could say the same about the call quality, however. Each call we made, whether indoors or outdoors, sounded fuzzy and garbled through the earbuds, almost as if the other caller were standing far away from a speakerphone. We were even tempted to take off the earbuds and use our handset during important calls. Increasing the distance of the phone to eight feet away from the Lanyard-connected iPod resulted in interrupting static, despite the company's claims of it being able to work up to 15 feet away. We lost the phone's audio altogether at 20 feet. On the plus side, people on the other end of our calls said our voice sounded good, even though the microphone was far away from our mouth.
 
The Hookup Lanyard helps bridge the gap between your iPod and cell phone and saves you the trouble of taking out and reinserting your earbuds. But the lackluster call quality prevents us from recommending this otherwise clever accessory.  

 

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