She's now considering getting wireless earbuds, but she's not a fan of having to recharge them to be able to use them, and is also cautious about the e-waste potential.

I was wondering if there exists a bluetooth device that connects to your phone, and the device itself is just a headphone jack.

I just keep buying phones with headphone jacks. I use bluetooth headphones too, but have a wired set for fallback, especially when travelling.

Also, if you're on a call or vc, a good wired set wth a well placed mike on the wire (e.g. marshall mode) gives you better sound quality and better exclusion of environment noise than any bluetooth headphones, and you don't have to worry about earbud batteries running out mid call.

It limits phone selection a lot, but so far there has been good phones with headphone jacks every time

I love my pixel 6a, except for this point.

Fortunately, I have no bad experience on it with USB c adapter and the jack glued to it 😁👌

The g84 is a great mid range phone with all the things that a phone should have, except for a decent camera.

Being Motorola it has a couple of idiotic quirks that will never get fixed

• kills Facebook messenger in the background no matter what your do.

• on some but not all Australian 5g networks, the camera closes after a few seconds and is unusable unless you switch to 4g etc.

I can live with those given the rest of the stuff is great for the price point.

Rarely use headphones so can't comment much on that side. FM radio seems to manage without.

she has to twitch the jack in the adapter for the thing to work

This is the downfall of all headphone jacks tbh

My current phone is a Samsung Galaxy A32, the last in the A3x line that has one. It's really nice to have a headphone jack because... well, you plug your pair in, and it just works. You don't have to worry about Bluetooth connections, or another battery that will die one day that you constantly have to recharge. Also, you get FM radio functionality on your phone, which isn't really useful, but it's pretty fun to mess with. I'm surprised Apple never had it on the iPod Touch despite the Nano and Classic both having it (some with a special accessory that unlocks the feature, some have it built in).

Also, support for my phone ends on Android 13 (One UI 5.1), meaning if I want new features (or even emoji updates), I have to get a newer phone, and that means either getting a lower tier model to keep that headphone jack at the cost of performance, or getting the same tier (or higher) at the cost of the jack. And I was never convinced by other Android phone manufacturers either, especially since companies like OnePlus don't sell their products in my country, so my options are either Samsung, Google, or a whole bunch of Chinese companies, many have really terrible skins of Android. Either that or I get an iPhone, and none of the ones that are currently supported have the headphone jack. So I guess I'm sticking with my A32 until the day it nukes itself.

I am about to switch to a pixel 7a from a 3a and am facing this issue. My wired ear buds date to some type of sandisk mp3 player I bought about 15 years ago and are pretty rough, so I have been looking at my wired options. Thanks for this post!

I got some bose bluetooth headphones probably 7-8 years ago at this point and they're still working fine. I hate earbuds, personally, so that was never an option. I do hate having one more thing to charge and possibly die, but the noise canceling is also super helpful so that's fine for me. I've had zero problems with google assistant or anything else, but I'm pretty sure I have it mostly disabled on my phone.