when the Galaxy Note 10 was announced on
Wednesday, Samsung talked about its new design, upgraded cameras and even
introduced a second, larger model called the Note 10 Plus. But one thing that
was never mentioned (aside from the Galaxy Fold) was the fact that there was no
longer a headphone jack on the Galaxy Note. A slide shown across the cavernous
screen of the Unpacked event stage showed the bottom of the Note 10 with its
USB-C port, S-Pen, and speaker grill. Absent were any signs of a headphone
jack.
If the Galaxy Note 9 launched without one a
year ago, this would have been huge news. But in 2019, when Apple doesn't sell
a single new iPhone model with a headphone jack and companies like Google,
OnePlus and Huawei have removed them from their flagships, it's not surprising
that the Galaxy Note 10 doesn't have one. More importantly, this move by
Samsung signals the end of the phone's headphone jack as we know it. I just
wish there was an equally universal standard replacing it that was also
affordable.
We can't pour one out for the 3.5-millimeter
audio jack just yet because brands like LG and Motorola still have them on new
phones. Motorola removed the headphone jack from its Moto Z phone in 2016 only
to bring it back on this year's Moto Z4. But having Samsung remove it from the
Note 10 is like turning the first page of the last chapter of a book. It's now
inevitable that most phones will never have them again.
The headphone jack was one of the longest
lasting and most widely used standards in consumer goods and gadgets. You can
plug the same pair of headphones into a Galaxy Note 9 that you can into an
iPhone 6S, Nintendo Switch, Mac or PC laptop as well as literally hundreds of
other devices. Decades before the iPod and the rise of smartphones, the only dongles
needed for headphones were either a quarter-inch adapter for higher end stereo
systems or a 2.5-millimeter adapter found in small electronics such as a pocket
transistor radio.
Dongles and adapters are now commonplace
especially if you hope to use the same pair of headphones on multiple devices.
And as annoying as dongles are, the inconvenience of using them obscures the
fact that there isn't a new single universal standard being adopted by
companies in lieu of the headphone jack.
Apple's wired earphones have a lightning
connector on them while nearly all Android phones use either USB-C headphones
or a USB-C dongle. But USB-C isn't the same across phones because at some point
audio needs to be converted from a digital signal into an analog one. Sometimes
that happens within a smartphone, as with the LG G8 and V50 which both have a
built-in 32-bit digital-to-analog converter (DAC). Other times it can happen in
the dongle itself. To complicate things further, some phone makers have
introduced proprietary features in their USB-C port. HTC's noise-cancellation
features, for example, mean the USB port is only compatible with an HTC dongle.
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