Use Your Phone in Lieu of Bluetooth Earphones

JLab Epic Bluetooth retails for ~$100

I wanted to take a minute to write some of you who might be drooling over the wireless bluetooth earphones (image left) on the market and thought I'd help save you some dough for similar functionality but at a much cheaper price point and more uses.

Instead of plunking down $100 and upwards for a decent set of bluetooth earphones, you can spend it on an great piece of software instead, depending on your use case.

If you need wireless because you like to run you will probably still want blue tooth earphones. But, if you simply want to be untethered from your computer while wandering around your house or work space, you can use your

Airfoil Retails for $30

phone, tablet or ipod, airplay capable devices, bluetooth audio devices or even other computers as a wireless bluetooth audio receiver.

Introducing Rogue Amoeba's Airfoil application (image right). Airfoil works natively on the Mac and Windows Operating Systems (OS). There are two parts, the host and the client.  You can think of the host as the "broadcaster", it transmits whatever source of audio you wish, be it an individual app like Spotify, iTunes, a web browser like Google Chrome, or Mozilla Firefox (so you can stream Youtube or other streaming music services like Last.fm Pandora, 8track or Focus At Will) or system audio (everything). The sky is the limit really.

If it plays on your computer, you can stream it to your phone. Install airfoil's companion audio receiver app on your phone (ios, android) plug in your wired earphones, open the Airfoil application on your computer, pick a audio source, open the Satelite application on your phone, select the airfoil host on your computer and voila. You've got untethered sound however far your wifi/bluetooth/airplay devices extends.


The cool thing is that it can also work the other way around, your phone can also transmit the same audio to all your computers, airplay, bluetooth devices as well. Airfoil is a very flexible and useful audio streaming tool.

If you are a runner, and you have the cash to drop, you might want to splurge on both products anyways. I'm certain a fair number of people already have.