The best phones with a headphone jack - December 2024
The best phones with a headphone jack - December 2024
Do you still prefer a physical connection to your headphones? Here is our list of the best Android phones with a headphone jack.
You're viewing a single thread.
For the crazy people like me who won't let it go
It's not crazy to want to keep using your excellent wired headphones and not rely on battery powered bullshit
I have a pair of Etymotics that i have had for 20 years, ficks no 3.5mm jack. Have a Nokia phone I use that has uSD and earphone jack.
It is when you act like adapters don't exist
This is written by someone who's using IEMs on a pixel, this weird obsession with jacks on the phones should have died years ago
They turn a robust connector into a fragile piece of shit, 1/2 ass'd compromise is the best description.
I'm using IEMs on a pixel too, with a jack as intended not some bullshit dongle.
God you children rage so hard on these connectors, whine harder it's fucking funny
nah, it's crazy that phone designers let it go
I mean, I can count how many times I've thought "damn I wish I still had wired headphones" on zero hands.
Damn, I'd need like 100 hands to count those times myself. To each their own?
FYI "to each their own" was a phrase used on the entrance of a nazi concentration camp, same as "work sets you free". Might wanna avoid that phrase in the future
Makes no sense. Using a commonly used phrase has nothing to do with Nazis in almost any context despite the origin. No need to start making a list of things to change because of an old connection to something bad.
Wait until the guy hears that nazis drank water and were also... breathing?
I've never really understood the argument against headphone jacks. I can still use Bluetooth headphones with my phone. I can also use wired headphones and aux cables on my phone. Why would you want less features
I'd be fine if they gave us another USB C port, but inability to listen and charge the phone at the same time without using Bluetooth (which also needs to be charged) grinds my gears.
You can get a dongle that lets you charge and plug in headphones at the same time.
Just buy another piece of hardware which shouldn't be necessary at all
They aren't supporting the jack removal from what I can see, simply suggested a solution that one can easily do. No need to be hard on them for that.
I'm not arguing against it, just not particularly arguing for it. Out of all the removed features, I'd want the IR blaster back. I can't do that with Bluetooth.
Seems like FM/AM (did anyone do one of those?) Would be cool too
My complaint has always been that the stupid things need to endlessly be recharged.
I've got some AirPod Pros and they're great... for about 4 hours.
Then you're stopping what you're doing, recharging for half an hour, and then you're good for uh, another 3 hours because that wasn't a full charge.
And after the 2nd or 3rd time you've done that, your case is dead and you get to throw everything on a charger for a couple of hours.
Ooooooooor I can put in my wired headphones, and not give a shit about any of that, because that's not how those work at all.
I suppose most people don't spend most of their day listening to podcasts and audiobooks and thus 4 hours is fine, but good lord is it annoying as crap.
You have airpod pros but spending $5 USB-Aux adapter is where you draw the line?
But then you always need that adapter with you and you can't charge at the same time
You can leave it attached to the end of your headphone wire
If the latter is a concern, there are adapters that allow this as well, which, you can also leave attached to the end of your charging cord
I had a similar problem. If thats your only limiation, check out the audiotechnica ATH-CKS50TW. Really excellent sound quality, the headphones themselves have 12hrs continuous use and the headphone case holds 24hrs of charge. Has full noise cancelling, and the headphones can be used independently of one another like airpods.
I can wear them on the bus to work, all day at work, and then on the ride home and still have an hour or two of charge left over before I have to put them back in their case.
Do airpods really suck that much? I've used the Anker ones for years, for about an hour 3-5 times a week, and I need to charge them... maybe once every six weeks? It's infrequently enough that I hardly notice.
They really do.
The sound great, and the ANC is great, but the "official" battery life for a brand new one (which these are not) is "up to 4.5 hours" with ANC on, and 5 without it.
It ends up being 2-3 charge cycles basically every day, plus a full recharge of the charging case.
They do, however, work amazingly well if you're in the Apple ecosystem; for example they'll swap between my iPad and Mac Mini if audio starts on one or the other.
But for actually sitting down with something and listening to a thing, I'd rather just plug in some headphones (via the lovely USB-C dongle) and not have to think about if the stupid things are going to die before I'm ready to stop listening.
(Disclaimer: I'm also a weirdo who doesn't carry a smartphone, and still uses an iPod for listening to stuff outside of the house, so feel free to roll your eyes and disregard my obviously bad opinions :P )
Sound great? Either you've never had a pair of cans on, or you might want to consider getting your hearing checked. The membranes in airpods are too small to recreate full frequency spectrum. Yeah, they're more clear than the earbuds of yore, but they can't hold a candle to my $30 Gemini DJ headphones. No, they don't have any noise canceling, but I like to hear the car that's about to run me over when I'm out and about, and if you turn em up a little you won't hear anything else anyway. Never have to charge, and pure, clean sound including REAL bass and not some distorted "bass boost".
Might have been unclear; I listen basically exclusively to spoken word stuff. Podcasts, audobooks, "raido" plays, etc.
The Airpods actually sound remarkably good and clear (and ANC helps a lot with ensuring clarity anywhere even slightly noisy) with voices, so for my uses, they sound perfectly fine.
I have a pile of Chi-Fi earbuds that absolutely destroy them in sound quality for music, but it's very much a 99.9% of the time it's not music situation.
I can. Every time I forget to recharge my wireless headphones case.
I dunno, how about the horrible privacy practices of most cars nowadays? Bluetooth allows connection, sure. It also allows data to go between the device and the car. An aux jack can't do that.
An aux jack can't do that.
Really? Because there are aux jacks that allow for voice and volume control. Seems to me like they could make one for "real data".
Well, if they can, that's interesting. But the method used to control volume and a mic are a hell of a lot simpler than transferring data. You'd need an expanded jack with extra circuitry afaik.
At that point, you're over to a usb cable, which is where all this starts.
I mean, it's all just electrical signals. They could simplify the data for such a transfer. The volume and mic do have an extra wire or two in them, but those are still made no bigger than those without, and the jack just has an extra ring or two on it for the connection. Most everybody is oblivious to the presence of those rings. So, I would say it's totally possible, but is it worth it money-and-effort-wise?
Well, there's a difference between analog and digital. So, no matter how you cut it, if the aux jack is there, making it do double duty is essentially turning it into a usb port.
You can't really send much data at any kind of useful speed over the size and types of wiring in even the more complicated headphone wires, which usually aren't even present in an actual aux cord that's got a plug on each end.
The level of data transfer over Bluetooth is both higher, and is already set up to move data like the cars nowadays scrape.
So, while it would conceivably be possible to make new aux cords that are beefed up to do it, and make the jacks in both phones/tablets and head units interpret the signals, it isn't so much whether or not it's worth it money wise, it's will the car owners and passengers buy it?
The connectors, as is, have a limited number of connections, poles. To change that, you have to make the plugs and jacks bigger, or radically redesign them.
From a "worth it" standpoint, they're already taking the cheaper way out of trying to force everyone to use the Bluetooth that's already built in. Get device makers to stop having jacks, stop putting them in cars, and the problem is solved on their end. It then falls to the consumer to find a way around that.
Must be nice to either accept the objectively worse sound quality of wireless headphones, or be wealthy enough to afford a product that sounds almost as good as the wired version does for ten times the price and just not care about it getting stolen.
I care a moderate amount about audio quality, but my bigger gripes with Bluetooth generally involve the latency and inconvenience of switching devices (even with multipoint).
IDK about you, but in the environments where I'd use headphones with my phone are not environments where I'm capable of noticing the audio difference between bluetooth and wired.
Ten times is an extreme exaggeration unless you're really at the bottom end of earbuds. Decent quality bluetooth headphones aren't that much more expensive.
be wealthy enough to afford a product that sounds almost as good as the wired version does for ten times the price
Or maybe just go buy a $5 adapter so you can use your wired headphones
Are you personally using a $5 adapter? They are junk.
If I cared that much about audio quality, I wouldn't be listening to music on my phone anyway.
I'm not sure which product you're referring to that's ten times the price. You can get quality monitors for around $200. I don't know of any Bluetooth headphones that are going to match that quality at any price, but you can get close enough for the majority of purposes in the same price range. The biggest issue will be the Bluetooth audio codec and the wireless link itself (signal strength and latency), not the sound reproduction quality.
My phone plays flac. What's poor quality about that?
The DAC between the file and the 3.5mm jack.
If you going to complain about that, never listen to a CD or any other digital format. Let me guess, only vinyl is pure?
I'm not the one complaining about it, hence the "if" in my previous comment.
I like rhythm games so I prefer wired.
Which ones do you play on your phone?
To be honest, I've used Bluetooth headphones before Android was even a thing (stupid W850i proprietary ports and all) and love them.
However, dickhead here just put my Soundcore buds through the wash so there is argument for me having a backup which this Poco F6 is now lacking.
It's a silly divisive topic IMO which is never gonna be solved when blog authors put out articles like the above.
:(
It's not us who are crazy!
My daily driver is a Poco F2 Pro which has the jack port.
My car is old and I still wire it to the speakers for using Spotify and such, my gf has to use the adapter thingy for her iPhone and she can't charge and play music at the same time, I can do that without an issue.
Too bad companies keep getting rid of ports.
There are adapters with charger throughput. Or else a car phone holder with wireless charging capability that's connected to the cigarette lighter port will do the trick.
A fellow F2 Pro owner here. I don't have use for the aux port that often, but whenever I do, it's great! Older cars, mixers, etc, everything is just plug and play like it should be.
However the notorious charging port ribbon cable seems to have broken again and this might be some of the last things I write with the phone :(
However the notorious charging port ribbon cable seems to have broken again and this might be some of the last things I write with the phone :(
Yeah, that is one annoying issue for sure.
It happened to mine as well, what I did year (years?) ago, was to use a tiny piece of electric tape in the flex to make pressure and make it to recognize the charger as well...
Still working fine after that.
If your device stops recognizing data I think it is game over though.
Bluetooth audio is terrible. And 2.4 GHz doesn't seem to be very common.
I just got a USB-C to 3.5" adapter and done. The phones listed here are either overpriced or shit.
Extremely hard disagree. Have you used a modern Sony phone before? What makes the Sony over priced compared to it's Apple, Samsung or Google counterparts?
I've used older Xperia phones, not new ones. But a list price of 1400 bucks is by default overpriced. Samsungs are so full of bloat and proprietary shit, I wouldn't touch them, ever. Plus their bootloader can't be unlocked, which is heavily restricting my use cases.
Wouldn't ever touch Apple devices either, and while Pixel phones are great, the price points of the new 9 Pro at around 900 bucks is high, but barely in acceptable range for me. Don't have one (still happy with my OnePlus 10 Pro, that was about 650 bucks I think), but that's the only high end brand you mentioned that I would consider if I were to upgrade at this point.