I did a video here if your not the reading type. - please digg! ;)
So, recently with the help of the wonderful iphone3g application runkeeper i have started walking/running again before the start of my day. I work from home so getting away from the chair once a day to exercise is a godsend. The problem with me has always been motivation to engage in the exercise for any length of time/duration/regularity. Recently my headphones, a great set of panasonic hc30 noise reduction types gave up the ghost from all the running and i have audio coming out of one ear only now. Doh.
I went hunting around for something would be both wireless but also work with my iphone, computer and allow me to have calls and music in a pretty good quality. I found the ceruluan fx1 and they looked perfect, reporting on the website that they worked on the iphone3g. once they arrived however things went a **little bit sour.
See the problem is that the f1 is normally sold with a little device called the TX - a little transmitter that you have under the iphone/ipod to enable the audio from the device to be sent to the headphones. The iphone3g looks not be compatible with the TX currently and to top it off you cannot buy it separately (i know i contacted the company) - so here i am stuff with some quality stereo bluetooth headphones that do not do what i want them to do.
On reading the packaging however i saw a list of formats and transmission types that they do support. One of them was A2DP. I remember seeing that you could buy these units relatively cheaply for the iphone and i then ordered a blueNEXT transmitter which arrived this morning. Within 2 minutes of plugging it in doing the pairing thing i was listening to very loud, crystal clear stereo bluetooth enabled sound.
I heartily recommend the ceruluan f1 and a bluenext adapter if you have an iphone3g and are looking for a bluetooth 2.0 stereo audio solution - especially if your are running.
A2DP was initially used in conjunction with an intermediate Bluetooth transceiver that connects to a standard audio output jack, encodes the incoming audio to a Bluetooth-friendly format, and sends the signal wirelessly to Bluetooth headphones that decode and play the audio. Many Bluetooth 1.1 and 1.2 mobile phones and portable media players do not natively support A2DP, while some newer Bluetooth 2.0 headphones do support it.
UPDATE - Mac OS X: As of version 10.5, Mac OS X includes native support for A2DP on Bluetooth-equipped Macs.
UPDATE2 - seems my first revision macpro has older tech as the signal is really poor quality audio - looking at one of these nano bluenext usb devices to maybe install instead. ;)
