The nice people at Magneat have sent me some of these funky-looking, earphone-wrangling Magneat doohickeys to have a look at. The Magneat fastens to the front of your shirt using two strong magnets, allowing you wrap your headphone cord. This keeps the cord in place and stop it catching on train seats, bus seats or small furry animals.

It couldn’t be simpler to use, just slide the two halves apart, drop the back part down the front of your shirt and use it to pin the front half where you need it. The magnets are strong enough so it will find the front half and align itself exactly. You can slide the Magneat around to wherever you need it for fine adjustment. Then wrap your headphone cable around it and push the lose end into the slot to hold it there. If you need your ears, just pull out the earphones and they can dangle. The magnet will grip through a T-shirt with no problems. I also tried it on a few different thicknesses of jackets and coats and it still held tight, even through double thickness coats. You could even pin it to your scarf.

The powerful magnet is completely safe for flash-based media players but it may affect hard drives. PC World severely doubts that, however it’s probably best to store your HDD based player separate from your Magneat though. The only other problem I found was with hi-end headphones and earphones. On my full sized headphones the cable was a flattened dual-cord design which could only be wrapped around the Magnet a couple of times. The Magneat still held the cable in place but you couldn’t store much of the cable by wrapping it around. My Shure E3 earphone cables couldn’t be pushed through retaining slot, but you could still wrap them around.

The other great use I found for the Magneat was for jogging with in-earphones, the ones that push into your ear canal. If you’ve ever tried to jog with them, they’re very loud as the cable flaps around while you run and the noise is transmitted straight into your head. The Magneat helps pin the cable down and stops it bumping so it’s much quieter.

Pros

• Protects your earphones and your ears from being yanked
• Easy to reposition
• Plenty of different designs
• Super easy to use

Cons

• May not work with thicker or dual-cord headphones
• May need to be careful around hard drive equipped media players

Conclusion

The Magneat is simple and brilliant and will pay for itself easily by protecting your headphones/earphones from being yanked out or damaged. The only caveat is if you’re going to use the Magneat with high quality earphones. There’s a bunch of designs and they’re very reasonably priced at US$14.90. You can pick one up from the online store, the HK website, or from Firebox.

Tags: gadget, magneat, magneat+review, headphone+organizer, review