It looks like another flagship phone is going to ditch the headphone jack
HTC probably has a new phone coming. According to noted phone leaker Evan Blass, it'll be called the Bolt, and it'll arrive on Sprint sometime in October. Blass tweeted an apparent press photo of the device on Wednesday, showing a phone that looks largely similar to the HTC 10 flagship the Taiwanese manufacturer launched earlier this year.
HTC Bolt in silver. pic.twitter.com/vAFVInwnbc
- Evan Blass (@evleaks) September 21, 2016
Looks pretty good, right? Well, if you're still snippy about Apple ditching the headphone jack with the iPhone 7, you might not want to look too closely at the top or bottom of the device. Whereas the HTC 10 put a 3.5mm connector on the top of the phone, the Bolt appears to hold nothing but a lone USB-C port at its bottom.
Now, if HTC does ditch the jack, it wouldn't be unprecedented for Android. Motorola omitted the longtime audio connector with its Moto Z phone earlier this year.
The issue for devices like these, though, is that the USB-C headphones market is much less developed than the Lightning headphones one. The iPhone 7 is massive enough to develop some sort of market for the latter, but on the Android side, it's less clear if the likes of Motorola and HTC can drum up enough interest to force headphone manufacturers' hand just yet.
Instead, you'd likely have to go Bluetooth, which has its own set of oft-repeated issues, or use a dongle, which is a dongle. Either way, if you thought the headphone jack conundrum was going to end with the iPhone 7, you might want to think again.
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