Let’s face it. Wearable electronics has been a rather boring market over the last few years. Sure it’s cool to have a jacket with embedded controls for your iPod.. but that “coolness” factor wears out fairly quickly and you end up thinking.. gee.. I wish the jacket could do more than play/stop my music.

Well that’s where the folks at QIO Systems come into play. The company has announced a new line of modular wearable electronics called PANiQ which allows consumers to decide which consumer electronics they want to control with their interactive wearable clothing. They call it a wearable “Personal Area Network”. We call it customizable wearable apparel.

The concept’s pretty straightforward. You’ll purchase clothing enabled with PANiQ electronics (i.e. they’ll come with PANiQ smart-fabric touchpad). Then you’ll purchase controller devices designed for your electronics – customizing your apparel to control the devices you care about. Thus unlike other jackets that might have controls and interfaces made specifically for the iPod, a PANiQ enabled jacket from a third party apparel manufacturer can theortically control a variety of device simply by swapping out a module controller.

At launch time, PANiQ announced the following controllers/devices:

• PANiQ controller for iPod (supports all third generation iPods and greater)
• PANiQ controller for iPhone
• PANiQ controller for Bluetooth enabled mobile phones and iPod
• PANiQ Walkie Talkie (Spring 2009)
• PANiQ AM/FM (Spring 2009)

As for apparel vendors, PANiQ’s initial customers include Cole Haan, Zoo York, KILLA, iQuantum, Celio, Beaucre, and Bailo.

PANiQ’s online store currently sells four KILLA products:

• The KILLA Go Go Gadget jacket for $250 dollars (and pictured above)
• The KILLA Infantry M65 jacket for $250 dollars

• The KILLA PUSHA Hoodie for $240 dollars

• The KILLA SNAKE EYES Hoodie for $230 dollars.

Here is the connector for the iPod ..

Which looks pretty much the same as the connector for Bluetooth cell phones and iPod ($79.99):

Check out the rest of the store at http://www.shopatron.com/index/1534.0.

Technorati Tags: QIO Systms, PANiQ, wearable electronics, personal area network