I use my iPhone with a headset during my motorcycle rides to and from work – it allows me to receive Cell calls. One thing that was bothersome was the lack of the ability to play music through the in-helmet bluetooth headset.
Now of course this is a headset aimed at voice so it uses the non-stereo, low-fidelity bluetooth so I am not looking at concert quality (i.e. this is *not* A2DP).
I saw some blog posts about how to use the Voice Mail feature to function as a work around.
Here is what you do: (1) Set up and pair up your bluetooth headset and make sure it works for phone calls, (2) Go into your iPhone iPod app and start playing something, (3) go into the phone app and go into voice mail – where it used to say “Speaker” it now says “Audio” – for me it just starts playing in the headset as soon as I am in the Voice Mail screen. I assume it routes audio-out to the headset so you can hear voice mail messages and until you play a voice mail message the music just streams to the headset. At that point do not press any more keys and you will hear your music.
It may be OK for a regular Bluetooth headset walking around – but in my motorcycle helmet the fidelity for music was so bad that it was almost pointless. However when I switched to a book on tape it was passable. So I will listen to all my books on tape on during my motorcycle commute.
My headset is a BlueAnt Interphone. I really love the headset – the microphone is amazingly good – the speaker could use a little noise canceling action – I have to put it pretty close to my ear to have a conversation at 70mph.
I cannot wait for the new iPhone 3Gs and its new voice dialing – oh yeah – when I buy it (after the lines to buy get shorter) – I will do a on-motorcycle review if the iPhone 3Gs+Blue Ant. I hope they don’t break the voice mail hack so I can listen to my books on tape while riding with no extra hardware.