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from the no-jack-in-the-box^W-phone-for-you dept.
Samsung has a long and illustrious history of trolling Apple in its smartphone commercials. But now the South Korean firm is cloning one of the iPhone features it once mocked, and it has quietly deleted records of the ads.
Samsung unveiled its Note 10 on Wednesday and, as has been widely observed, the phone falls in line with other new devices on the market in that it does not come with a 3.5 mm headphone jack.
[...] Samsung released a memorable advertisement in November 2017 titled "Growing Up." It features an iPhone user through the ages becoming increasingly frustrated with the limitations of his phone. In the end, he caves and buys a Samsung Galaxy. In one section, he ruefully inspects an adapter cable, which enables iPhone users to turn their charging portal into a 3.5 mm headphone jack.
Fast forward to 2019 and Note 10 customers may need a similar bit of kit to use wired headphones with their device. And as for that "Growing Up" ad, it has disappeared from some of Samsung's major YouTube channels.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday August 12 2019, @03:08PM (20 children)
As bluetooth electronics continue to plummet in price, and basic materials like copper continue to increase, we may someday reach a point where it's actually cheaper to manufacture and sell bluetooth earbuds than tangly cabled ones.
Not saying we're there yet, but, when you factor in the "user experience" of tangly cables vs. wireless solutions, we might be at a point where it's starting to make sense for non-fruit-heads to abandon the 3.5mm jack too.
I hate having to charge the batteries in wireless solutions almost as much as I hate untangling cheap earbud cables... almost.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 12 2019, @03:22PM (4 children)
Changing the batteries? Apple's version doesn't allow that. Once you factor in the battery cost the savings on copper becomes inconsequential.
I want a phone with a long-life, user-changeable battery, standard headphone jack, and standard MicroSD card storage. I guess my next phone will be a BlackBerry.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 12 2019, @04:25PM
I've been using Bluetooth ear buds for many years (LG, Boss, Jabra and others), and none of them have had replaceable batteries.
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Monday August 12 2019, @04:47PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Monday August 12 2019, @09:13PM
AFAIK, Motorola's 2018 & 2019 phones unfortunately don't have user-removable batteries. Everything else about them is cool, just not the battery situation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @12:25AM
Check out Caterpillar brand phones.
3.5mm? Check.
SD card? Check.
Long battery life? Check.
Swappable batteries? I don't think so, but oh well.
Plus: very rugged (basically toddler-safe), more-or-less standard android (mostly), some multi-SIM options (as I recall), and excellent sunlight visibility.
Not perfect, but a solid option.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by theluggage on Monday August 12 2019, @03:36PM (6 children)
Doesn't fix the problem with time lag, which currently makes BT headphones only suitable for listening to pre-recorded sound or video soundtracks (where the video gets delayed to wait for the sound to catch up)... and we're not talking a few ms that only people with golden ears get upset about - the BT delay can be a second or so, so anything 'interactive' is out. Once you start to look beyond simple phones to tablets etc. which are supposed to have serious uses (there's lots of music making software for iOS for instance) that's a bit stupid.
OK, for the moment there's USB-C or Lightning-to-3.5mm adapters... until you want to recharge your phone and you need a dongle/hub...
(Score: 4, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Monday August 12 2019, @04:14PM (5 children)
Lag is my biggest peeve with standard bluetooth audio, and to the people out there saying "you'll never notice 20ms": go jump off a f'ing cliff. Almost anyone can hear the difference between two audio impulses 2ms apart, if you've got good high frequency hearing you might be able to discern a difference down to 1ms, and even 1ms of lag is really more than we should put up with in audio gear.
Today's digital signal processing is more than capable of sub-millisecond lag end-to-end, what we lack are people who care every step of the way, and there are too damn many layers in the stack filled with people who think it's not a problem.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Alfred on Monday August 12 2019, @04:55PM (4 children)
Those who care about lag are also going to care about how crappy the DACs in the phone are and are not going to want to use those either.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday August 13 2019, @01:07AM (3 children)
If you've got lag variance between multiple channels, that's a nasty one to fix... the one that bugged me the most recently was trying to watch a video on the tablet using a bluetooth speaker for "better" sound - maybe with all the right software I could manually tune the two to be in sync, but that's not the tap and enjoy "experience" I am looking for - if these things didn't have massive lag built in, you wouldn't need to tweak the picture delay to match the sound.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Tuesday August 13 2019, @02:08PM (2 children)
The audio video sync issue is a real problem with no quick fix, unless VLC has some setting for audio latency. But it comes back to what I said about having a reference signal to measure the sync issue against. Someone should make a parody commercial about how their Bluetooth device turns all movies into kung fu movies.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday August 13 2019, @02:54PM (1 child)
it does, but when the fam is sitting down to enjoy a movie in the cabin of the boat, I'm not really willing to spend 5+ minutes fumbling around the "mobile interface" for VLC to try to find the video delay setting and then tweaking it by feel until I think I've improved the sync, only to be told by the wife "their lips still don't match the sound" 10 minutes into the movie. Much easier to say "that's just how it is, we're going to have to live with it."
I could imagine a photosensor in the bluetooth speakers that would attempt to synchronize flashing video test signals with a click track... not for $20 per speaker anytime soon, but maybe some day...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Tuesday August 13 2019, @07:07PM
(Score: 3, Informative) by bart9h on Monday August 12 2019, @05:39PM (3 children)
Am I the only one who still (occasionally) uses the FM radio?
The wired headphone is needed to act as an antenna.
If they are removing the 3.5mm jack, they should include an FM antenna built into the case.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday August 12 2019, @09:24PM (1 child)
I haven't had a phone with an FM radio in it for years. It is something I would pay extra for however.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday August 13 2019, @01:14AM
Check BangGood.com - all kinds of good phones, cheap, with features galore. For a US carrier that works with them, we like mint mobile.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Monday August 12 2019, @09:27PM
I wish my Moto E4 had an integrated antenna, as I listen to FM radio all the time in the car, but I don't like wearing headphones at home as it'd interfere with my ability to hear any sounds that indicate some sort of emergency (which unfortunately aren't terribly rare in my household).
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Tuesday August 13 2019, @12:14AM (2 children)
Besides copper, you also have to take into account the lithium used in the batteries. If electric cars really start to become popular, it's going to drive the price of lithium way up, probably must faster than the price of copper is going to increase.
Of course, the amount of lithium in Bluetooth earbuds is pretty small, but it's not like there's a huge amount of copper in a wired set. And if the price of copper gets too high, they can experiment with other materials like aluminum. But as batteries go, you're stuck with lithium for the time being in anything like headphones.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday August 13 2019, @01:12AM
True enough (battery cost > wire cost... for the most part), but I suppose my real point was that the cost of batteries + bluetooth electronics is pretty much hitting the floor where marketing, packaging, etc. is more a driver of cost than the goodies inside. If the wireless solution has a BOM cost of $2.25 and the wired solution BOM costs $0.75, does it really matter anymore? Nothing will ever sell at retail much below $5.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Tuesday August 13 2019, @04:22AM
Lithium has a hard price ceiling. At about double today's price it becomes economical to extract it from seawater and that supply is basically unlimited. Given some lag in the price/demand/build-new-plant system I think in the short term the price will go higher, but in the long term that is the maximum.
Much like the situation with oil and renewables, I would also expect current lithium prices to spike downwards as stockpiles are dumped on the market any time someone tries to build a seawater lithium extraction facility. It will be delayed by these tactics, but will happen in the end.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by EEMac on Tuesday August 13 2019, @12:38AM
Rechargeable devices need integrated batteries. That usually means fancy metals like Nickel Cadmium or Lithium. It's going to be tough for those to get cheaper than copper.