{"id":8103,"date":"2016-02-02T16:59:45","date_gmt":"2016-02-03T00:59:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/?p=8103"},"modified":"2016-02-02T17:28:44","modified_gmt":"2016-02-03T01:28:44","slug":"smartbean-bluetooth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/2016\/02\/smartbean-bluetooth\/","title":{"rendered":"Smartbean Turns Any Headphones or Speakers into Bluetooth Devices"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Smartbean<\/a>On Chit Chat Across the Pond last week, Dave Hamilton<\/a> and I talked about the repercussions if Apple removes the analog headphone jack. During this conversation we talked about Bluetooth and Dave mentioned a little device he uses called the Antec Smartbean. While I was recording with Dave, I bought my own Smartbean through Amazon for a grand total of $12 (with free Prime shipping).<\/a><\/p>\n

Smartbean is a 1.25 x 1.25 x 0.5 inch device with a built-in clip that turns wired headphones and speakers into Bluetooth devices. It’s pretty close to the size of the old square iPod Nano, a little smaller but thicker.<\/p>\n

I was especially interested in the Smartbean and in my conversation with Dave I mentioned how much trouble I have pairing Bluetooth devices and how I get audio dropouts with all of them. I figured the Smartbean wouldn’t be any different.
\n<\/p>\n

\"SmartbeanI went for a run with the Smartbean and my favorite standard headphones plugged into it. Not once did the sound cut out on me, no matter how I contorted myself. The sound was so much better than my Bluetooth headphones, it was a delight.<\/p>\n

All this is well and good but how easy is it to pair with your devices? On the front of the Smartbean is a play\/pause button in the middle of it, so using my vast knowledge of how stuff works, I pressed and held that button. I was rewarded with a blinking blue light and I heard “power on” in my headphones. I held it down again and this time the light blinked red, and I heard “power off.” Ok, pretty intuitive so far. What if I press and hold the button a bit longer? As I hoped, it said “power on” followed by “pairing.” Perfect! I looked for Smartbean in the Bluetooth section on my iPhone Settings and found it immediately and when selected, the Smartbean reported “paired’ into my headphones. PERFECT experience.<\/p>\n

I turned them off again and did a normal power on, and this time I was rewarded with the words “connected”. I also noticed that the lights changed behavior again in a super intuitive way. If I play audio from my iPhone to the Smartbean, the light blinks blue every few seconds. But if I stop playback and forget to turn off the Smartbean, it changes to blinking red to indicate it’s in standby mode.<\/p>\n

\"SmartbeanThis is a good point to give you some specs. According to Antec, the Smartbean will give you 6 hours of “talk” time and 130 hours standby. That standby time might be the most useful thing. How often have you forgotten to turn off a Bluetooth device? If you have an iOS device you can swipe down from the top of the screen to reveal a battery section for all Bluetooth-connected devices, including the Smartbean. Smartbean comes with a microUSB cable for charging.<\/p>\n

I mentioned that the square center button is play\/pause which controlled my iPhone playback as expected, and it also has up\/down volume buttons on either side of the center, and skip ahead\/back buttons on the opposite two sides. Those buttons obeyed my podcatcher, where I have it set to 10 seconds back and 45 seconds forward. Even better, these buttons were all in logical position if I used the clip that’s part of the Smartbean to clip it to my clothes on my left side. So up volume was up and jump ahead was to my right.<\/p>\n

I was so happy with the Smartbean and my headphones that Steve and I plugged it into all kinds of speakers around the house just to see how many of them we could make Bluetooth capable. We have a set of old analog computer speakers that Kyle just gave back to us and with no wires up our sleeves, we were able to play audio from a computer to those speakers.<\/p>\n

Smartbean even comes with a double ended audio jack so you could plug this into a car stereo’s analog jack and suddenly, for the grand sum of $12, you’ve got audio to your car speakers over Bluetooth. How cool is that?<\/p>\n

The Smartbean from Antec comes in a plethora of color options, all black, all white, white with black accents, silver, baby blue, and even pink if you’re of that persuasion. I put a link in the notes to the Smartbean on Amazon for $12<\/a>. Be sure to use that link instead of buying direct from Antec because it’s $40 from their website. It’s worth $40 but at $12 you can sprinkle them around your life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Chit Chat Across the Pond last week, Dave Hamilton and I talked about the repercussions if Apple removes the analog headphone jack. During this conversation we talked about Bluetooth and Dave mentioned a little device he uses called the Antec Smartbean. While I was recording with Dave, I bought my own Smartbean through Amazon […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[147],"tags":[102,389,423],"class_list":["post-8103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog-posts","tag-bluetooth","tag-headphones","tag-speakers"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8103"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8103\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8116,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8103\/revisions\/8116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}