Can We Ditch The Headphone Jack? | Hacker News Reader

Can We Ditch The Headphone Jack?

fastcolabs.com

6 pointsmxpxpx12 comments

I was at Palm/HP back when we did this on the Veer 4G smartphone... it only had a POGO-style magnetic connector on the side to support headphones, USB, and charging, but we shipped the phones with an adapter to allow using a 3.5mm-jack headset. We did it to make the phone as small as possible, but I don't think it was ever a well-loved decision.

Any idea why not? Looking at that pogo demo video, it seems like building the jack into the phone and supplying the adapter would be a perfect solution. I guess the main down-side is that it's another thing to keep track of.

Hmm... one thing that might help with that is to include a slot in the charger for the adapter, just to have somewhere to put it that isn't likely to get lost.

Oh man please no. Imagine having this in your pocket and playing music! The little amount of stress your pocket puts on it will make your music jump.

Imagine having a magsafe connector on a laptop without a battery. So every time your connector gets a bump your laptop shuts down. The reason magsafe works is because you don't need constant power, so a short interruption is okay.

The reason those TRS/TRRS connectors have been around for so long is that they flippin' work.

While I agree that a MagSafe-style equivalent would be nice, it will be a giant step backward if we end up with a gazillion new "standards." Or a de facto standard with a poor mechanical connector (e.g., micro USB). Or a great mechanical connector that's completely proprietary (Lightning).

Bluetooth headsets are not really a solution for the reasons mentioned in the article. Even with voice codecs there's lossy recompression going on, and music is worse. Add the delightful user experience of batteries, and you've managed to replace a light, decent-sounding, completely-reliable $15 set of earbuds with something heavier, lower-fidelity, always in need of charging, and more expensive. All for the sake of removing a wire.

That's the great thing about something like the pogo shown in the op though (except built into the device). It's entirely backward compatible, so they could include a set of headphones that connect directly, as well as the adapter that lets you use a standard 3.5mm jack.

According to Betteridge's law of headlines... no.

"devices right now won’t allow them to become much thinner" I'm sorry, but who cares? My LG Optimus F3 is way to thin for me to hold in my normal human-sized hands. I had to get a case just to be able to hold it! Let's stop making things thinner and start making them "usable"!

Plus, I'd rather not have to buy new headphones/audio equipment. I've never had problems with my headphones, and I don't want to have to buy adapters just to use the things I already have.

I mean, I guess in the future we could remove this jack, but if I were shopping, I'd buy the device with the jack on it.

Cool I guess, as long as sound quality is not degraded.

On the plus side, something like this would probably take a lot of stress off the headphone cables when you accidentally jerk them.

I'm in favor. Most 3.5" jacks are horribly made. Only the 1/4" jack ever worked well.

I desperately want us to ditch RJ45 for something as compact as Apple's lightning connector but is an open standard and easy to make (i.e. uses a crimping tool)

I believe apple will fight this like crasy.

More proprietary connectors please. /s

Please, no.

no indeed. this is but a infomercial for a very lousy product. the so called reporter does not even acknoledge that millions of cellphones in the past used 2mm plugs and they were hated by everyone. also nokia tried the popport for the same reason, and was equally hated.

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