How-to connect your iPad or iPhone to Bluetooth speakers Video

How-to connect your iPad or iPhone to Bluetooth speakers Video Transcript

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>> Hi, I'm Scott Stein, Senior Associate Editor at CNET.com. And today I'm gonna show you how to connect your iPad or iPhone to a Bluetooth speaker wirelessly to play music, or any audio really. Now it also works with non-iPhone smartphones that have what's called A2DP Bluetooth. We'll get to that in a moment. But it's really easy to do; the funny thing is that most of us don't do it. You think in order to play music you have to plug your iPhone into a dock through the pin connector at the bottom. The good news is that you don't. If you can put up with a little bit of battery loss for the playback, it can really free you up. And we'll show you some ideas of how to use it. The first thing you'll want to do is make sure that the iPhone or the iPad has Bluetooth turned on. When it's there it goes into discovery mode, and all your speaker systems that have Bluetooth have a discovery mode that can be activated as well. You have to read the instruction manual to figure out exactly how to do it, but it usually involves pressing and holding the appropriate button until a blue light starts to blink in a certain frequency. It may not be the same for every device, and sometimes it takes a little bit of fiddling with. Once that happens you'll know that it actually pops up on the screen as a device to connect to. Really all you have to do is tap to connect to it. Now many devices that are Bluetooth will ask for a 3 or 4 digit pin code to enter. Your instruction manual will tell you what it is. Many times it's 0000. Some newer speaker systems and others may not actually have a pin code at all. One of our Creative speakers connected automatically. Once you have that it's set to go. Now a Bluetooth speaker system can only connect with one device at a time. So if you connect your iPad then want to connect your iPhone you may find it's not working. You'll have to disconnect from that device first, then put this back into discovery mode to connect the next device. The good news is if you're only using one device, the next time you connect it it's a lot simpler. You just turn it on, put in Bluetooth, and it should automatically reconnect and set you up. Now we tried it on a lot of different apps on the iPad and on the iPhone using iOS 4. And it works not just with music, but with movie playbacks, with Internet radio, with games. There are a couple of apps that don't support it. You'll find once in a while, you know, magic piano on the iPad for some reason didn't connect. It may not work, but what's really nice on the iPhone is that the background streaming of audio really means that you can connect this to Internet radio and then walk around your home, use your iPhone for any task you want, and have the music playing in the background. It really frees you up from having it connected to a dock. And the good news is that we've talked about iPhone and iPad, now there are many other devices that have Bluetooth audio that connect the same way. If you have an Android Smartphone, or any other device really that can have it, you want to look inside the specs for that system and just look to make sure that A2DP is listed under Bluetooth. Just because you have Bluetooth does not mean you're gonna have Bluetooth audio, and is actually a separate codec. There's one difference in interface between the iPad and the iPhone. While the iPad seems to require most of the time for you to adjust the volume on the speaker set itself, the side volume rocker doesn't work. On the iPhone playing music and using most radio apps, the volume adjuster slider here controls the Bluetooth volume, which is great. If you walk around the home you can bring it up or down, if you feel like it's getting too annoying. Maybe they feel that with an iPad you're probably gonna be seated pretty close to the speaker. So that's really it, I mean, it is really simple. Really it's a matter of bring out awareness, so you can do it. I was surprised that I don't do it more often. Kind of makes me want to get a Bluetooth speaker system myself and set it up. Especially for the Internet radio streaming at home. I'm Scott Stein, and this is how to connect your iPad or iPhone to a Bluetooth speaker set. ^M00:03:37 [ music ] ^E00:03:41