ZIK Parrot by Starck

We know – that Philippe Starck, he’s everywhere.  Why doesn’t he give up and let someone else have a go?  Well, there’s a reason the grizzled designer is so ubiquitous; he’s very, very good.  TF once sat in the audience at a conference in Venice where Starck talked about getting old and the consequences thereof.  One such was a lack of flexibility and athletic poise in the bedroom arena.  Instead of dieting and exercising, which were too much like hard work, old Philippe designed a sex chair.  More of a sex-couch, really.

Philippe Starck's naughty couch

Part of his Privé range for Italian furniture house Cassina, it resembles Mies van der Rohe’s famous Barcelona chair and has platform levels that can be adjusted to achieve the perfect shagging height for both parties.  Genius.

At CES, Parrot, a French company that are probably best known for those daft BluetoothA form of wireless transmission commonly found in mobile phones. Two Bluetooth enabled devices that are 'paired', such as a smartphone and an earpiece/headphones,will 'talk' to each other. Bluetooth is now found in speaker docks to allow wireless streaming of music from a source such as a smartphone to the speaker dock. There have been several iterations of Bluetooth technology, the latest of which is Bluetooth 4.0. earpieces – worn by really, really busy important tycoon-types who need to be hands-free 24/7, yeah? – were showing a very clever but slightly pointless hovering thingy (it was on the first episode of the current run of Top Gear) and a line of wireless headphones designed by M. Starck.

ZIK Parrot by Philippe Starck

Whether they sound any good or work as they should – the ones we tried were prototypes and slightly temperamental – is important but not that important.  If you’re living with a supermodel you can probably forgive them the occasional dodgy moment.  And these ZIK headphones do look ever-so luscious.  We wish they’d used Kleer wireless technology rather than Bluetooth (which isn’t as good) but whereas your smartphoneOpposite of dumbphone. Device with which which to do pretty much anything except make telephone calls. The best smartphone handsets, such as the AppleFruit, record label, world dominator in the slick boy's toys department iPhoneCostly but beautiful smartphone made by Apple. The standard by which all other smartphones are judged. and Samsung Galaxy, are expensive (the iPhone 5 starts at £529) and to get a 'free' phone you have to commit to a 2 year contract. As we know, new phones come crashing onto the market all the time, so today's state-of-the-art handset will be seriously old hat long before that contract expires. will likely have Bluetooth built in, Kleer requires a plug-in dongle (who comes up with these words – toddlers?).  Swings, roundabouts etc.

The ZIK have active noise cancelling and the juice for that is acquired via an internal battery that’s charged via a mini-USB socket.  Volume and track forward/back control is achieved by swiping the side of the right-hand earpiece and the headphones know when you’ve taken them off and power down to standby automatically.

These lovely cans, which will have Bose and B&W all a-quiver, will be available later in the year for God knows how much.  TF is guessing ‘quite a lot’.  But since so many headphones look like shit or are aimed at impressionable yoof we’ll be saving our shekels to nab a pair.