natasha's corner

What is it with companies doing weird things with headphone jacks lately?

First, there is the iPhone problem. Unless you buy “iPhone compatible” headphones, yours probably won’t fit into the slim recessed hole that Apple put on the iPhones. (I can’t speak for the 3G ones, my experience is only with the first generation iPhone.) Why they decided to do this is beyond me. I had to first get an adapter, and then went out and bought new headphones after getting fed up with the extra length and inflexibility the adapter provided.

I don’t use the iPhone as my main mp3 player, though, so recently I got a new Sansa Fuze because it integrates with Rhapsody. The strange thing about this mp3 player is that SanDisk decided to put the headphone jack on the bottom of the device.

I’ve been trying to figure out why this makes any sense from a design perspective and have only been able to come up with one advantage that this design provides over the standard headphones-on-top design. If you hold the mp3 player in your hand while you’re walking, you probably hold it upside-down so that the screen faces you and you can read the text on it right-side-up. You probably also hold your thumb on the control wheel. In this scenario, having the headphones plugged in at the top of the player (thus, facing down toward the ground), might get in the way, as the cord would constantly brush against your hand. Having the jack on the bottom of the player resolves this issue by having the cord remain out of the way.

It seems like a bit of a stretch to think that this is why it was designed like this. More likely, it has something to do with the way it is structured internally. Maybe, in order to keep the player as thin and as small as it is, the headphone jack had to be moved away from the screen because it would not fit behind it. Whatever the reason, there are at least two major disadvatages to the design:

• It’s awkward putting the player in your pocket with the cord on the bottom. If you use the player controls right from your pocket, like I do, the headphone cord is always in the way.
• The headphone jack is too close to the USB cord connector jack, so depending on your headphones, you may not be able to have both plugged in at the same time.

I would think something like headphone jacks would be standardized by now. Everyone has headphones, almost all digital devices have headphone jacks… how hard is it to make something that just works? A simple non-recessed connector at the top of the device does the trick quite well. What problems are designers trying to solve by introducing these non-standard designs?