Twelve South has announced a new version of its Airfly dongle that simplifies the pairing process when connecting wireless headphones to devices that don’t natively support Bluetooth. Instead of having to decode flashing or color-changing LEDs, the new Airfly View adds a built-in screen that displays instructions for each step of the pairing process in one of 24 different languages including Japanese, Arabic, Portuguese, and Polish.
The Airfly View is available starting today for $79.99 and includes a carrying case and an adapter for connecting the dongle’s short 3.5mm headphone cable to an airplane’s split headphone jack. That makes it one of Twelve South’s most expensive versions of the Airfly, but the screen is useful for more than just letting you toss the user manual.
The display has a battery level indicator so you can estimate how much of the Airfly View’s estimated 16 hours of battery life remains, and it shows the name of which wireless headphones or earbuds are connected based on how they identify themselves over Bluetooth. That could be useful if you’re juggling a family of flyers who are all traveling with their own headphones.
You can stream audio from a single Airfly View dongle to two connected pairs of wireless headphones simultaneously, but Twelve South also says it “supports Auracast broadcast audio, so it is ready for the next generation of Bluetooth headphones.” That will further expand how many devices can receive audio from a single dongle but is dependent on wireless headphones fully supporting that Auracast feature, and not many currently do.
