It seems a lot of mobile phone manufacturers are now are introducing phones with no 3.5mm port and expecting customers to go wireless when listening to music on their phones.

Personally, I've been using Bluetooth headphones for years but is taking away the 3.5mm port too much? I mean, it's nice to have the choice.

The headphone port on my old phone broke so i had to resort to using bluetooth earphones and i personally hated it. I get the bus to and from work and listen to music most of the day so was a nightmare making sure they were charged and had enough battery. And as user of earphones rather than headphones I found the battery / remote on the earphones big and annoying hanging round my neck. I found it to be too much of a hassle for me that i just ended up just buying a new phone to go back to wired earphones.

The headphone port is not that big, how skinny are they wanting to make phones that they can't include it.

Argos will not repair the socket even though you bought accidental damage insurance when you bought the phone with them.

If you do want to use conventional wired earhphones with your iPhone 7, but don't want to carry around the adapter, there are several solutions. Here's one.

It all comes down to the battery issue again. It seems to be the single biggest problem facing modern technology - we're designing clever and clever devices but haven't been able to make the same strides in how we power them. No one would care about having bluetooth headsets if the battery lasted a month rather than a week.

I wonder how many people who watched that video (and others like it) were terminally stupid enough to believe it and tried it on their own phones!

It's nice to have the choice, and it's a shame that so many manufacturers have no imagination beyond "just copy what Apple does". I wish the iPhone 7 was a giant flop, so it'd force them to think for themselves. Unfortunately it's not, so the logic is "welp, removing the headphone jack is the right thing to do"

I mean, I called it the moment the iPhone 7 was announced and all the Android fans were memeing about it and how it's proof that iPhones are terrible, I said "give it a year max and the Android manufacturers will be doing the same" but it's not always good to be right.

I don't want to go wireless. I have a decent, moderately expensive of wired headphones that work with just about everything. I'm not about to go out and buy another set of bluetooth headphones, nor am I going to buy a bluetooth adapter.

It's a PITA, yet another device with a non-serviceable battery (having one in the phone itself is bad enough), that will go on the scrapheap once it wears out.

I don't particularly want to use a wired adapter either. They're fragile and add bulk. The old school phone manufacturers realised this a decade ago, so quite why Apple and co are trying to reinvent the wheel is beyond me.

I blame the obsession with making phones as thin as possible when they just don't have to be. Though my current phone is pretty thin, the battery life isn't bad, and it has 3.5mm and USB-C ports. No problem at all.

This!! That's the main reason I can't live without the headphone jack.

I won't buy a phone without the 3.5mm jack, I've bought cheap and expensive Bluetooth headphones and none of them compare even slightly to my Sony ZX600's. Not only that, when I have used my bluetooth headphones I've run out of batteries, and my phone battery goes down too fast.

Mark

Bluetooth wireless headphones are particularly expensive.

Same. I use the headphone jack a lot to output audio into my car radio's aux in. No way I'll buy a phone without a headphone jack. What's the point in removing it anyway

I would care as I am yet to be convinced audio fidelity does not suffer over Bluetooth compared to using cable,

At the moment I'm using Sony's SBH-60 because these are both wired and wireless and cost around £28..

So if the battery does go then I can connect the cable and draw on the phone's battery, which does last longer than a day easily anyway. As for reliability, well I haven't had a 3.5mm port fail on me yet, fingers crossed.

...so that the device looks at home in a design museum even if the functionality is lost due to the obsession with the Cult of Thin (here's looking at you Cook and Ive).

I sincerely hope that no other major phone maker follows the Apple lead and in the longer term I suspect this decision will come back to haunt them.

The late Steve Jobs was an evolutionary radical but the now unrestrained Cook and Ive are revolutionary radicals and they are seriously beginning to p̶i̶s̶s̶ ̶o̶f̶f̶ upset iPhone and Macbook customers with their changes. The beneficiaries of what Cook and Ive are now doing will be Android (phones) and Windows and Linux (laptops).

I can see Samsung following their lead unfortunatly. Hope I'm wrong, because I like their phones. Although I'm still on the S5 and looking at perhaps upgrading to the S7, once the S8 launches and the price comes down.

You get an adaptor for free with the lightning socket, so you could just permanently connect the adaptor to your headphones and leave it on?

I'm not really bothered, if the Samsung S8 had everything else I liked and lost the headphone socket it wouldn't bother me, I'd buy usb C headphones (the official set if that's what they do), I also have bluetooth ones anyway.

We know samsung does nothing but copy Apple , and Apple shapes the technology industry more than some want to believe. http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/6/13...one-jack-usb-c

It isn't necessarily copying, it's just that we're moving to a nice reversible USB C standard and also trying to make phones small, thin, light, with the best battery live and people want less borders and more screen, so you can have the phone as small as possible but still have a 5 or 5 1/2 inch screen. Also the physical button at the bottom is to some extent dying out.

Fitting all that in means there isn't the room for additional connectors, remember that headphone jack goes all the way in to the device and then also needs receiving pins and a socket, it is incredibly wasteful of space on a miniaturized phone compared to the smaller component for the charge / sync which can also do audio.

Example Sony Experia inner socket https://www.replacebase.co.uk/media/...e95/h/p/hp.jpg

Laptops are getting USB C for charge and accessories now, Apple weren't first and it won't be long before the 1970's analogue headphone socket is wiped out all together on higher end quality stuff, there will also be a range of lightning and USB C headphones this year. Headphones only really last 2-3 years if used regularly anyway, so people will just need to upgrade at some point and use the adaptor in the interim, which works perfectly well if left on the headphone lead. Added to that many already use bluetooth.

The issue for me is I can't charge and listen to music at the same time. If they put 2 lightning ports on (or 2 usb C ports on the S8), then I'd be ok. And adapters are bulky and fiddly and I'd be scared of losing them, and to be honest I just don't see why I should need an adapter for something my older phone can do just fine.

Which wireless charging technology did Samsung copy from Apple?

Most charge overnight though and with quick charge now coming to most phones you can get about 6 hours battery life in 20 minutes, there's always bluetooth instead, then you've got the best of all worlds and added to that the very removal of this is making more room for bigger batteries.

The only time I've missed my 3.5mm socket on iPhone 7 is in my car-my Fiesta has Bluetooth but no support for wireless audio playback.

Was easier to use the AUX input whilst listening to sat nav/music and charging my phone at the same time.

It might be an Apple problem but I've always found any Bluetooth earphones I've used to cut out quite frequently or have really poor audio quality.

agree on the car playing/satnav and charging issue

You could use one of these, charge and BT at the same time.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01K4R8RLM


I've got a pair of cheap BT earphones, work fine with a 6, 6s Plus and 7.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01AJQVB0C