Slashdot Mirror
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?
Android, leader in Chinese knock offs.
a slot for a MicroSD card. given that I have other devices that have a headphone jack.
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!
It would be great if in conjunction with removing the headphone jack they were also releasing a bunch of affordable USB-C headphones. My current phone still supports regular headphones, but it also has USB-C. So every once in a while, I look to see if there are any USB-C headphones I can grab --- because I assume the audio quality will be better. But there's hardly anything on Amazon and what is there is more expensive than similar or better headphones that have the traditional plug.
And it's not much better in the Apple space, either.
it's a lot easier to transfer files from one device to another with a SD card as opposed to a USB cable or via a cloud storage service.
Hmm... 128 GB? That's about 160 albums of music (I like redbook quality - FLAC), with all the normal other stuff there. Not much, really. I like having another 256 GB of MicroSD for a dedicated 400 album music library - without touching my main phone's storage.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
>"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.
No SD slot, and likely no Miracast.
This is shaping up to be a very courageous phone design team indeed.
Please note I'm using the modern definition of "courageous", ie pants-on-head loony.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I'm listening to podcasts more or less all day while I work. Most bluetooth headphones can't last a full day (a few will). The ones that do, I don't find comfortable.
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.
USB 3 is still serial, it has separate transmit and receive signals, like old fashion serial protocols like RS-232 and RS-422
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.
I know this is blatantly off topic and I'm just feeding a troll but I've been hooked and can't let go.
USB is a serial bus (2 pins for supply + 2 pins for serial signal), but USB-C isn't because is a parallel bus.
The Universal Serial Bus is a parallel bus?
USB-C is a new plug which can implement the USB3 protocol.
The USB3 protocol uses two sets of differential pairs for high speed communication. This is a serial bus and the same setup as many other systems including Serial ATA.
For backwards compatibility USB3 plugs contain wiring for both the serial USB2 signal and the serial USB3 signal, typically referred to as a dual signal. A typical device enumerates on one of the two busses, hubs enumerate on both to form two hubs one of which handles downstream USB3, the other downstream USB1/2.
However multiple serial busses does not make it a parallel bus, especially because the two signal sets run independently are clocked at different rates.
Looks like we're going to need to go back to multiple devices soon.
What happens once you stop paying your Dropbox bill? I thought in such a case, files past 2 GB got deleted. And how well does Dropbox work when upstream is $5 to $10 per GB, such as satellite or LTE, or when upstream isn't available at all, such as between a laptop and tablet on a city bus?
Oblig.
His is a perfectly valid response. Just because something's from the 1980's doesn't mean we need to ditch it. Hell, I'm from the 1980's and I find new uses for myself all the time.
Incidentally, the 3.5 mm jack is actually 19th c. tech, just slightly scaled down for some applications in the 20th c..
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.
Just how do you think Apple's modern headphones work anyway? They use AAC so as long as your headphones support AAC (which all of the decent ones do), then the sound quality is as good (or better) than it would have been with AptX.
If AptX were really better Apple would support that also.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Hearing the difference now isn’t the reason to encode to FLAC. FLAC uses lossless compression, while MP3 is ‘lossy’. What this means is that for each year the MP3 sits on your hard drive, it will lose roughly 12kbps, assuming you have SATA – it’s about 15kbps on IDE, but only 7kbps on SCSI, due to rotational velocidensity. You don’t want to know how much worse it is on CD-ROM or other optical media. I started collecting MP3s in about 2001, and if I try to play any of the tracks I downloaded back then, even the stuff I grabbed at 320kbps, they just sound like crap. The bass is terrible, the midrangewell don’t get me started. Some of those albums have degraded down to 32 or even 16kbps. FLAC rips from the same period still sound great, even if they weren’t stored correctly, in a cool, dry place. Seriously, stick to FLAC, you may not be able to hear the difference now, but in a year or two, you’ll be glad you did. /pasta
It's even easier using Airdrop.
That's ageism! Seriously though, what the fuck is wrong with companies? The headphone jack still works, digital wireless headphones have to use audio compression to have enough bandwidth and we're already listening to compressed audio in the first place. Are all new engineers deaf?
#DeleteFacebook
What the fuck? Lossy compression has nothing to do with the quality of data retrieval on a hard disk. If you've got data corruption, it'll affect any sort of file (and `flac -t` will tell you when a file is corrupted). a 320kbps MP3 stored with no intermitent data corruption from 2001 will have exactly the same bits and quality that it did in 2001. (Encoders have gotten better. A 320kbps MP3 from 2001 might sound worse than the song from the same source being encoded as 320kbps MP3 *today*, but that hs nothing to do with magical degradation.)
Bluetooth means compressed audio. We're already listening to compressed audio (files or streaming) and you're re-compressing it a second time! Are you deaf or something?
#DeleteFacebook
Do you hear the crack of the sound barrier as the whoosh flies overhead?
The moto x ^4 is headlining Android One for Project Fi in the US is a mid-range device ~$399 with a Headphone jack, SD-Card slot, and Micro-USB.
See: Motorola Moto X4 - Full phone specifications
It has not gone away. Most brand new motherboards in mATX and ATX form factor do have headers for a parallel port and also a serial port.
You would just need to get brackets for them to get sockets out the back - just like you had to do with AT motherboards back in the day.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
In my house, I have a minimum of several dozen devices with standard 3.5mm headphone jacks. This includes my stereo, my TVs, my iPads (no intention of upgrading, they're good enough), my Windows tablets (we have at least 15 laying around the house), Kindle (for text to speech) ,etc...
To switch the headphones, I would need to replace about $40-$50,000 of devices.
3.5 mm jacks are imperfect and always have been. They're a terrible design but probably the best we could hope for given the manufacturing equipment of the time. The original 1/4" "telephone plug" or monaural plug dates to 1878. The 3.5mm jack dates from the 50's but I can't find anything more precise from Googling. The fact that something so small could be made in the 50's... especially when most things had to be hand-assembled back then is truly amazing.
So that said... given a standard that already dates back 60-70 years... I have no intention of giving up my headphones and their wires. They work well enough... I don't have to charge them... and since I prefer ear buds, I sure as shit don't want to lose them constantly because they're not physically attached to my phone.
Oh... and dongles are just plain stupid... I have Ajay 5 headphones and have bought 20-30 pairs of AJays over the years because they are more durable than most others. They don't make dongles of comparable strength or cable quality.
No he didn't hear it : the sound of the whoosh was encoded with MP3 at a too low quality setting, he should have used FLAC instead.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The only place where you need a wifi router to use Airdrop is inside your head.
I don't want to wear Bluetooth headphones 5 to 6 hours a day (noise-cancelling, courtesy of that productivity killer fad of open-offices).
As for the arguments for an SD slot : I want to be able to switch storage to another device easily and quickly and to do backups. Even if built-in storage was not so grossly overpriced, I would still choose SD.
Irrelevant news and morons using moderation to mod down what they disagree on. 2018 resolution: so long.