by Lori Cunningham

During CES I came across the BlueAnt Ribbon Stereo Bluetooth Streamer, which looked like a thick plastic ribbon that you wear on your shirt.  It includes headphones that plug into the bottom of the ribbon and comfortably into your ears.  The main premise of the BlueAnt Ribbon is to be able to wirelessly stream the music from your phone to the headphones connected to your BlueAnt Ribbon.

Streaming Your Phone’s Music

So you may be thinking, why not just plug your earphones into your phone to listen to your music?  Yes, you can do that, but the benefit of the BlueAnt Streamer is that you do not need to have your heavy phone on you to enjoy your tunes.  You can leave your phone on the counter charging.  Nice.  You can even control the volume of your phone, skip to the next song…or next 10 songs or go back as many songs as you like.  You just need to be within 25 feet of your phone for the Bluetooth connection to work.

I can see the BlueAnt Ribbon handy for:

• gardening
• doing chores…especially vacuuming – it can be so loud
• watching your kids during their sports practices
• running/walking – it’s easy to adjust volume and repeat songs
• workouts
• family road trips and you want to drift away to your favorite songs…provided your not driving!
• relaxing by the pool or beach

What You Can Stream:

• music on your phone
• Pandora/Slacker/etc.
• online radio stations
• YouTube
• videos and voice recordings you made (audio only)
• voice mail
• phone calls
• anything that makes noise on your phone!

Answering Calls

Listening to music on the BlueAnt Ribbon is relaxing, but what happens when a phone call comes into your phone?  Just by pressing the play button on the Ribbon, you can answer and take the call using the Ribbon and your earphones.  You can also press the play button twice to dismiss the call.  There’s no need to rush to your phone to answer it, just answer it using the Ribbon.  Simple.  The Ribbon has a built in microphone so you can take calls using HD quality.

Using Siri or Google Voice Commands

I discovered that you can also use Siri or Google Voice  commands to tell your phone what you’d like to do.  For example you can say, “note to self” (Google Voice) and your  Android phone will transcribe your message and send a voice file and the transcribed message to your gmail account.  Slick.  Or you can say “map of” and name the location and your phone will find it for you.  You can do all these things on your phone without BlueAnt, but I think it’s cool that you can do it with your BlueAnt Ribbon too.

Enjoy Music Through Your Home Speakers

As small as the BlueAnt Ribbon is, it actually includes a port for a standard 3.5mm stereo output, so you can use the included headphones (which sound great) or your favorite headphones.  The BlueAnt Ribbon comes with a 3.5mm AUX cable to connect your Ribbon to your Hi-Fi, speaker dock, or surround sound system through their AUX input.  Now you can listen to your latest tunes from your phone on your older stereo system.  Perfect.  You can then use your phone to remotely control your tunes on your stereo to increase/decrease the music, switch songs…or even playlists.  I tested this with several devices, including the AR Wireless Speaker (using the Aux input) and the Boston Soundbar and the BlueAnt Ribbon worked with them seamlessly.  I could then leave the BlueAnt Ribbon attached via the AUX input and sit down across the room and control the music and sound level using my smartphone.

However, I was not able to use the supplied 3.5mm Aux jack to connect the BlueAnt Ribbon to my stereo receiver, as it required a larger input, the 6.3,mm size.  With some searching, I did find that I could buy an adapter to bridgetogether the 3.5mm adapter to the 6.3mm adapter for under $10.

In the Car

The same 3.5mm Aux cable that you can use for your stereo system at home can be used in your car too, as long as you have a AUX port in your car. By connecting your BlueAnt Ribbon via the 3.5mm Aux cable, your car stereo system can now playback music via Bluetooth directly from your smartphone.  Slick.  I tried it with my car and it worked.  I could listen to both my tunes and Pandora Radio.  The only odd  thing I noticed was that I had to turn up the volume pretty loud to get a decent sound from my car stereo.

The BlueAnt Ribbon sells for $69 with free shipping directly from BlueAnt or for $69.99 from Amazon , also with free shipping.

A Mom’s Perspective

I have to admit, I was a little skeptical at first if I could get into using the BlueAnt Ribbon.  After all, in the past I’ve just attached headphones to my phone and I was good to go.  Only, now that I have the Galaxy S3, there’s not as much room in my pocket anymore to lug around the phone to listen to music.  The BlueAnt Ribbon easily clips onto my clothes with a simple twist and doesn’t weigh me down in the least, like my phone does.  I don’t often listen to music via headphones, but I have really enjoyed listening to my tunes with the BlueAnt.  Music sounds great when streamed from a speaker, but listening to it more personally using ear buds brings such great fidelity and sound, I’ve really been enjoying it.

*  I was given a BlueAnt Ribbon to use in exchange for my honest opinion.  All opinions are my own.