Wireless headphones in general are very useful, but Apple's AirPods in particular are one of my all-time favorite gadgets. I barely feel them in my ears, and they let me listen to music, podcasts and videos without any annoying cords hanging down my face. To use AirPods, you need an iPhone or other device with Bluetooth. What do you do if you want to use your AirPods to listen to audio coming from a headphone jack but Bluetooth is unavailable, such as an in-flight entertainment system on an airplane or the audio in a health club? The clever folks at Twelve South developed the AirFly for this very situation. Plug the AirFly into the headphone jack of the audio source, and then the AirFly uses Bluetooth to send the audio to your AirPods. Twelve South sent me a free sample unit for review purposes, and this device is great. The AirFly is a simple solution that works very well.
The hardware
The AirFly is smaller than the case that holds your AirPods. It is 1.8" high, 1.3" wide, and has a depth of .4 inches. And it weighs about a half an ounce — virtually nothing. It comes with two small cords, a USB-to-Micro-USB cord that you use to charge the AirFly, and a small headphone cable.
It take two hours to fully charge the AirFly, and when fully charged the AirFly lasts about eight hours.
There is a single button on the front of the AirFly, used to turn the unit on and off and for pairing. There are two ports on the bottom: Micro-USB for charging, and a headphone jack.
To make it easier to carry around the AirFly and the two cords, it comes with a small carrying pouch.
Connecting to the AirFly
To pair the AirFly to your AirPods for the first time, you hold down the button on the front of the AirFly for 10 seconds, then you hold down the white button on the back of the AirPods case. But you only have to do this pairing the first time that you connect. In the future, you can just turn on the AirFly and your AirPods will automatically connect.
To switch from using the AirFly to using your iPhone again, just hold down the button on the front of the AirFly for five seconds to turn the unit off. Then open up the Bluetooth settings on your iPhone and tap AirPods to connect them again. It is even easier to switch from the iPhone back to the AirFly; just turn on the AirFly by pressing that front button for five seconds, and your AirPods will automatically disconnect from your iPhone and connect to the AirFly.
Although the AirFly works great with Apple's AirPods, it can work with any Bluetooth headphones.
The AirFly uses Bluetooth version 4.1, so your AirPods can be about 30 feet away from the AirFly and still work — pretty much the same range that I get when using my AirPods with my iPhone.
Connecting to an audio source
With a name like "AirFly" you can tell that Twelve South thinks that most folks will want to use this device on an airplane. However, I didn't have any flights during the past few weeks so I wasn't able to test them while I was in flight.
Instead, I turned back the clock to the Fall of 2005. Think back to a time before the iPhone when the iPod was still all the rage, and larger Apple Stores even featured an iPod Bar:
The Fifth Generation iPod was the hottest new model, large enough to hold 15,000 songs and also display 25,000 photos and 150 hours of video on its huge (for its time) 2" x 1.5" color screen.
Bluetooth headphones were just starting to hit the market at the time — Stephen Regenold reported in Popular Science on September 29, 2005 that Wireless Headphones are Finally Here, but I didn't know anyone using Bluetooth headphones back them, and certainly nothing as small and innovative as the AirPods.
I pulled my old iPod out of retirement so that it could act as an audio source. I plugged one end of the headphone cord into the AirFly and plugged the other end in into the iPod. Within a few seconds, I was listening to songs from my old iPod using my new AirPods, and the music sounded great.
It was so incredibly freeing to be able to walk anywhere around the room and continue to listen to my iPod. The 2005 version of myself would have loved using the AirFly and AirPods. I listened to songs on my old iPod for a long time, and it was actually fun to use a device with a click wheel again.
I also tried the AirFly with other devices in my house with headphone jacks, and it worked great every time. Look around your own house or office and I'm sure that you will see audio sources that have a headphone jack but don't support Bluetooth. An iPod, a stereo system, a record player, a TV, a radio, a portable gaming system, an older computer, a portable DVD player ... if it has a headphone jack, the AirFly will make it work with your AirPods.
Conclusion
A few hours after I took the above photo of my old iPod with the AirFly attached, I went back to play with it some more, and it looks like the screen on the iPod finally died. I tried all of the old tricks for restarting an iPod to no avail. While it is sad to say goodbye to an iPod that I used almost every day for so many years, I'm glad that I had one last chance to use it. Thanks to the AirFly, I was able to give that old iPod a taste of the future. Perhaps one day, airplane entertainment systems and other devices will all include native Bluetooth support. But until that day comes, the AirFly is a perfect way to use a headphone jack with AirPods.
Click here to get AirFly from Amazon ($39.99)
