Death to non-3.5mm headphone jacks

Can we officially have a retirement party for any headphone jack that is not a standard 3.5mm/1.25" jack? In the last few years, having a standard headphone jack was a competitive advantage. It's easy to understand that manufacturers make their money off accessories so selling a set of headphones does impact their revenue. The problem is that you have to sell the device first and a non-3.5mm jack is a major turnoff. That means if we want to use out existing set of headphones, we have to buy one of those 2.5mm to 3.5mm dongles. In that case, that leaves the consumer with an extra piece of hardware to carry around and the manufacturer without a headphone sale. Also knows as a lose-lose.

The device above is probably excluded from this conversation. The Blackberry 8830 is the corporate staple. RIM doesn't have to market these devices to consumers; they don't care if a single end-user buys one. Whether I want another device or not, I'm going to be stuck with the 8830 until something new my company appoves a newer model (hopefully the tour). Maybe it will have a standard jack.

Taking the headphone jack problem one step further is HTC and Apple. HTC doesn't even have a 2.5mm headphone jack. Their users are envious of people who can buy the $1.50 adapter at radioshack. The HTC G1 is stuck with a proprietary jack that requires its own adapter. Apple slapped consumers even harder in the face by requiring the new iPod Shuffle to have a chip in the headphone jack in order for it to work at all. That's a licensing cha-ching! There shouldn't be any surprise; we are talking about Apple.

Can we please agree to kill all non-3.5mm heaphone jacks? I have a better way to make even more money. I have a blackberry with a 3.5mm headphone jack. I could use any old set a headphones. Instead, I chose the premium RIM earbuds since they have a unit on the headphones that control the volume and media player. As a consumer, I chose to spend additional money with the manufacturer because they offered a quality product with a good feature-set. If I had to buy the same product in a 2.5mm jack, I probably wouldn't have out of spite. I have a better chance of being able to use this set of earuds on my next Blackberry. Happy consumer.