Samsung's Upcoming Galaxy S8 Flagship Smartphone Won't Have a Headphone Jack: Report (sammobile.com)

Samsung is planning to ditch headphone jack in its next flagship smartphone, called the Samsung Galaxy S8, reports SamMobile, a Samsung-focused blog that has a pretty good track record with these things. From the report: Removing the 3.5mm headphone jack enables Samsung to make the Galaxy S8 thinner while also freeing up more space inside for a bigger battery. Samsung may also integrate stereo speakers which some believe will be made in collaboration with Harman, a company that Samsung is acquiring for $8 billion.

Comments

Sweet

[bartosek]

Guess who's not buying an S8?

Re:Sweet

[Anonymous Coward]

The burn victims?

Re:Sweet

[Oswald McWeany]

Seems cyclical, the leading manufacturer eventually gets complacent and arrogant and starts to think they know what the consumer wants more than the consumer does.

Re:Sweet

[ClickOnThis]

Guess who's not buying an S8?

The burn victims?

I wouldn't blame them for lacking the, uh, courage.

Re: Sweet

[ganjadude]

guess its time to lok into LG or moto once again for me. ive been happy with the S line from the time i switched from a slider moto droid1-3 and i have an s7 now. I made peace with the internal battery but i use the jack and dont see me not using it and im not using dongles so. moto....LG, make me happy!

Re:Sweet

[clone73]

The burn victims?

Heh... Samsung is never going to live down the S7 is it?

Especially if people keep confusing the Note 7 with the S7.

Re: Sweet

[Grishnakh]

I stay a little behind the curve; I last had an S4 which I liked a lot, and then I upgraded to an S5 which I use now, and I'll happily show iPhone owners why this phone is so great (easily-replaced battery, SDcard slot, waterproof, etc.).

But the S6 was crap (it eliminated all 3 features!), the S7 brought back two of them but not the battery, and now they want to dump the headphone jack so I can't use my expensive Sennheisers at work or on an airplane? WTF are they thinking? No, I'm not going to use a fucking dongle.

So I guess when it's time to move on from my S5, I'll have to look at some other brand, like Moto or LG. Maybe even Huawei or some other Chinese brand; they don't seem to be as stupid about chasing Apple.

Re: Sweet

[Type44Q]

It's gonna die whether anyone wants it to or not.

Deader than LP's in England, no doubt. ;)

Re:Sweet

[arglebargle_xiv]

make the Galaxy S8 thinner while also freeing up more space inside for a bigger battery

So it'll burn longer?

Re:Sweet

[suso]

Slashdot, where a comment about someone not having enough mod points is marked up as "Informative". Now watch this one get modded up as insightful. Maybe later it will get meta moderated.

thinner = more likely to blow up

[Joe_Dragon]

thinner = more likely to blow up can we get one with sd card, battery you can swap, etc.

Thinner

[110010001000]

Do people really want thinner phones? They all seem to put big old protective cases around them anyway.

Re:Thinner

[caseih]

I always put cases on my phones precisely so they will be a little thicker and easier to hold. I find the thinner the phone the more awkward it is to use. Even to hold it in front of me an interact with it.

Re:Thinner

[ClickOnThis]

Obviously it's people with small hands!

/ I didn't say any names...

With a username like Oswald McWeany, you don't have to.

Re:Thinner

[Falos]

It's not the consumers, it's the headlines. When a tech rag has 60 seconds to examine a maybe-functional prototype at an expo/con they're going to write about garbage. They're going to write about how firm and clicky the buttons are (with up/downspin vocuabulary, either is easy), they're going to write about what the texture of the back plate feels like, they're going to write about the physical appearance (!) of the camera module. They're going to fill a whole fucking paragraph about thinness, if they can.

Consumers inhabiting reality don't give a flying fuck. They want to know how well it handles scratching/dropping/bending. They want to know how long the battery handles the actual OS/software bloat in real-world conditions. They want to know if said bloat boots/runs stuff slowly, despite N specs. They want to know how it literally handles - how long takes a robotic hand on average to drop it, during randomized clutching gestures.

But none of that is in the RSS feeds. Only "7.93mm*!" or "Curved screen!" or "Thinnest bevel ever!"

Gee, no bevel. Anyone going to stick THAT in your jeans without a case? Anyone? Show of hands? Surely some of you can afford to be careless with devices racing to break $1000.

Soooooo lesson not learned?

[H3lldr0p]

Wasn't there an article yesterday saying that the battery problems with the G7 Note largely due to it being too thin? Which, given the circumstances seems to be a fairly strong thesis for the trouble. So why try to go thinner?

I get there's a lead time on design and engineering and that it's quite likely this particular design has been in the works before the Note 7 was even out the door. But it seems like poor management to not backup and start over just to be certain the same design flaws don't happen again. Starting by not having thinness as a goal.

Then again, I'm not an exec working on their quarterly bonus. I'm just a guy on the internet.

Ever thinner

[TroII]

enables Samsung to make the Galaxy S8 thinner

What is this fucking obsession with making phones thinner? I want a phone that's sturdy. I wouldn't mind my phone being two or even three times as thick, if it could have double or triple the battery life. What I don't want is a fragile, dainty phone that's going to snap in half if I hold it the wrong way. Who is asking for thinner phones?

Re:Ever thinner

[Oswald McWeany]

Yeah! People, stop fat-shaming my one year old phone! It's not how thin your phone is, wide phones can be beautiful too.

It's the hardware inside that counts.

Re:Ever thinner

[OzPeter]

Yeah! People, stop fat-shaming my one year old phone! It's not how thin your phone is, wide phones can be beautiful too.

It really is disingenuous to fat shame phones. Samsung unequivocally proved that no-one wants a hottie smart phone.

No headphone jack?

[SpankiMonki]

Apple should sue Samsung for copying the iPhone...oh wait

I'd rather a headphone jack

[Oswald McWeany]

I'd rather a headphone jack than my phone to be slightly thinner.

Phones have been thin enough since 2010. Having a thinner phone is exactly dead last on my list of priorities... about two or three spots below having a headphone jack.

Oh FFS

[TheBilgeRat]

My daughter purchased the new jackless iPhone. The misplacing of the adapter for a non-bluetooth pair of headphones has been occurring on a semi-regular basis. Its a terrible design decision. Not everyone wants to also charge their bluetooth headphones. Now, if they introduce a line of bt headphones that cost 20 bucks and don't suck we might be getting somewhere. Or at least include them instead of making it an upcharge.

Copying Apple

[Roger W Moore]

Except that in this case Samsung has a long history of copying Apple and apparently it seems to extend to even copying their stupid ideas. However it would be ironic if they put a USB-C on the phone and used that for the earphones too because then their phone would be more compatible with the new MacBooks than the iPhone.

Re:Copying Apple

[aergern]

They've already said it's going to be USB-C and the audio will use that port.

KNOCK IT OFF WITH "THINNER"!!!

[Verdatum]

WHAT, DID THE PHONE INDUSTRY GET CURSED BY A SHITTY STEPHEN KING NOVEL? I haven't wished my phone was thinner for a decade now. I haven't given a pair of fetted dingos kidneys how thin my phone is and I've never met anyone who has. The only allowable excuse for this is if the phone is able to come with a free Bluetooth reciever while selling them together at a lower full-retail-price than the S7.

I own an S5, and was considering getting an S8, but unless someone can give me a better reason than "thinner, more battery room!" then I'll gladly wait for someone else to come along and eat Samsung's lunch.

Re:Bluetooth Headphones

[Obfuscant]

You can always use Bluetooth headphones.

You can try.

1. The battery goes dead after a short period of time, so then you can't.

2. You are in a WiFi-rich environment, which means you get about a 1' range for your bluetooth. I've actually been in places where even with the phone in my shirt pocket, if I turned my head left or right the signal was lost.

3. You have a smart watch which is linked via bluetooth, in which case you can't link a headphone at the same time (I've tried.)

4. You want to feed the audio to some wired system. (Yes there are bluetooth to jack adapters, but the one I have never seems to have a charged battery, so refer to #1).

Something's not right here.

[mark-t]

Every other report that I can find of this news anywhere on the web links back to Sammobile, who says that they can somehow "exclusively confirm" this, but does not mention *how*, exactly, that they were able to confirm it... The only reasons that I can imagine that they would not give this information are if they had acquired it by doing something of questionable legality and almost certainly unethical, or else they are just making shit up.

Maybe it's bullshit, and maybe not... but something's definitely not right here, and I think it's socially irresponsible to propagate this kind of story when it can't be confirmed.