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Google Is Latest Company To Ditch Headphone Jack In Its Newest Smartphones (cultofmac.com)
When launching its original Pixel smartphone, Google mocked the iPhone 7's missing headphone jack in its marketing material. According to Cult of Mac, Google won't be doing the same for the Pixel 2. "The company has decided to remove the aging port from its latest handsets," reports Cult of Mac. "A new leak reveals that the lineup will rely solely on USB-C for wired connectivity." From the report: Incredibly reliable leaker Evan Blass has published pictures and details of Google's upcoming Pixel 2 smartphones on VentureBeat. He has also confirmed that neither device will feature a headphone jack, which means users will have to rely on a USB-C adapter or Bluetooth. It also means Google will no longer be able to put out Pixel ads that take sly swipes at the iPhone's missing port. Blass says both Pixel handsets will be powered by a Snapdragon 835 chipset -- the same one found in the Galaxy S8, the LG V30, and other 2017 flagships -- not a faster Snapdragon 836 processor as originally planned. Other features are said to include 12-megapixel cameras, 4GB of RAM, and 64GB or 128GB storage options. The smaller Pixel will pack a 5-inch 1080p display with a 16:9, while its larger sibling will pack a 6-inch Quad HD display with an 18:9 aspect ratio. Is the lack of a headphone jack a deal-breaker, or do you think the Pixel's other features, like stock Android and front-facing stereo speakers, will make up for it?
Samsung, the biggest cellphone maker of them all, still supports the 3.5mm jack. My new Note 8 has one, and with the 256 GB MicroSD card installed I have a ton of downloaded Tidal albums...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Sony and Nokia have phones with the same processor but with the 3.5mm jack, expandable storage and water/dust resistance. Their software is close to Google's and Sony contributes to AOSP. Google loses. Oh, and if you want to make good photos, buy a goddamn dedicated camera. No phone comes close and none will due to the laws of optics.
Waka Waka!
I, like many /. readers I want a phone with a MicroSD slot and regular security updates for at least 2 years.
>"Is the lack of a headphone jack a deal-breaker"
100% yes. Although I am not happy with lack of SD cards, I can handle that if a reasonable storage size is available, 64+GB. I am never happy with a non-swappable battery, but it seems that is beating a dead horse. Certainly also unhappy that wireless charging is so rare. Other unhappiness- lack of NFC, thinness instead of battery size, pixel density instead of brightness and efficiency, huge screen instead of portability.
But I have to draw the line somewhere, and it is at losing a simple, compact, compatible, easy, reliable headphone jack. There is simply no really good reason to remove it. I don't know when I will or won't need it, and I don't want to carry a stupid adapter that also is expensive, easy to lose, sucks more power, is likely to break, makes the phone weak and awkward while using it, and prevents charging while using it.
Sucks to get stuck with Bluetooth if you want to travel, though... Many overseas airlines will not allow use of Bluetooth headphones, and technically the FAA did not allow them either (just BLE-based devices). And that's not even talking about the audio quality hit you'd get with Bluetooth unless you're running something decent like AptX or AptX HD (neither of which is available on iOS).
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
This shouldn't come as any surprise considering how it was discussed in the context of DRM a decade ago. People choose the cloud, people loose choice.
My car has aux in. They talk about how 3.5mm Jack's are crap and wear out. Well now I'm going to wear out my charging port and turn my phone into a paper weight. I think about it every time I plug my phone in to it.
I use it in my car to connect to my oem head unit. I use to connect to some old powered PC speakers in the bathroom. I use it to connect to aux in on a few other devices. In other words, DEAL BREAKER.
We're talking about a plug which is on possibly billions of devices.
This isn't just headphones and headsets, this is being able to plug into the analog port on amplifier, this standard is used on boom boxes 20 years ago, on audio 'in' ports for the past 20 or 30 years on a plethora of devices.
It's all fine and dandy for smarmy tools to say "oh shut up, get USB-C headphones!" but USB-C headphones won't work on my OTHER devices easily and I sure as shit don't see them changing any time soon, literally billions of devices over the world.
Why are people so blind and so quick to dismiss their elders? We didn't bitch and moan when USB replaced serial ports, parallel ports and PS/2 ports, because USB was clearly superior. We didn't bitch and moan when USB flash drives replaced floppy drives because we were already way past the 1.44MB capacity of those damn discs.
But ditching the headphone jack? Why? Bluetooth is not superior in any way: for losing the wire, all you gain is low-quality compressed audio, expensive headphones and yet another battery to recharge every day.
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People who quote the horseless carriages in this case only show their own ignorance of history.
It took a good 30 years for the horseless carriage to catch on. By that time the costs plummeted and it started showing real advantages including actually being faster and more comfortable than the horse drawn counterpart. There was a long history before mass adoption where the horseless carriage was a piece of shit that was slow, useless, and in some cases even required a person walking in front of it to be used legally.
That is where wireless headphones are right now. There's not a single wireless headphone on the market that can out perform its wired counterpart in any metric other than not having a wire.
They have their use cases, but they are not in the general all encompassing case superior.