From Chaim Gartenberg at The Verge:
Cassette tapes are having a minor comeback: sales were (somehow) up almost 19 percentyear over year in 2018, and where there’s a market, there’s a Kickstarter project looking to cash in. Case in point: the Ninm It’s OK. It’s sort of what a portable cassette player like an original Walkman would be if Sony continued to develop tape-based tech in 2019.
So while the It’s OK does the usual tape things, like playing cassettes or letting you record to tapes, it also bills itself as the world’s first Bluetooth 5.0 portable cassette player (a claim of such niche specificity that it seems to be true). It allows you to listen to your favorite jams with wireless headphones or even link it to a Bluetooth speaker, should you wish.
Call me crazy, but I think this is stellar. What a perfect time to revive cassette tapes too, right on the heels of the 40th anniversary of the Sony Walkman. Sign me up. Allow me to summarize my reasoning:
- I miss the TalkBoy.
- Now, all I can actually listen to cassettes again! Even the newly tapes from my friends bands.
You can back the project on Kickstarter, and pre-order it here. Here’s a pretty great diagram of the bells and whistles on the It’s OK device:
