Twelve South’s AirFly View adds a screen to headphone pairing

Twelve South has announced AirFly View, a new version of its AirFly dongle for connecting wireless headphones to devices without built-in Bluetooth. Its screen displays step-by-step pairing instructions in 24 languages, including Japanese, Arabic, Portuguese and Polish. The instructions replace the flashing or color-changing LEDs used by earlier versions to indicate the pairing process.

AirFly View is available starting today for $79.99. It comes with a carrying case and an adapter for connecting its short 3.5mm headphone cable to an airplane’s split headphone jack. The screen also shows the dongle’s battery level and the name of the connected headphones or earbuds, based on how they identify themselves over Bluetooth. Twelve South estimates the battery lasts 16 hours.

A single AirFly View can stream audio to two pairs of wireless headphones at once. Twelve South also says the dongle supports Auracast broadcast audio, which could allow more devices to receive audio. That depends on headphones supporting Auracast, which the source says few currently do.