Android

Regarding your sister's issue: that happened to me less when I paid a little more for a quality adapter. I think I got a two pack for $15 and the cord has some rubber protection where the wire turns into USB C and where it turns into a headphone jack. Haven't had the same issue your sister is having ever since.

The headphone cable is excellent for sure and I will never ever buy another set of wireless headphones again.

I have one set of wireless earbuds (Sony XM3) for when bigger headphones are impractical and for the price the battery life is shit. After roughly 2ish years of moderate use the battery life is cut noticeably and after 3 they barely last 30 minutes. Thankfully changing the battery is fairly simple (go sony!) although the battery used is a weird proprietary cell that cannot be purchased through legitimate channels and is fairly expensive (boo sony). But whatever, $30 on batteries is better than tossing earbuds that cost $250-300 a few years ago.

That said I have moved on from phones with headphone jacks. I still have a few sets of proper ass headphones that are pretty nice. If I want to use them with my phone I don’t fuck with dongles, I have a Qudelix 5K DAC/AMP. This allows me to use my wired headphones with any Bluetooth thing really. The only thing that could improve it is a user replaceable battery, and they made that: the Qudelix T71 although I haven’t tried that. And frankly I’m pretty sure I can figure out swapping the battery on this whenever it croaks. I’ve sourced and changed a lot of batteries in my time.

It’s not as nice as my proper setup for listening to flac or vinyl but it’s pretty indistinguishable aurally for the most part when listening to flac on my phone (vs flac on my home server via my better dac/amp which again is pretty aurally indistinguishable unless you’re a buttsniffing audiophile type. And if you are I dare you to double blind test it)

I lost my jack during an upgrade last year, but I also got free buds with the phone. I thought I would hate them, but I actually listen to more music now than I ever did before because it's so convenient not to be wired to the phone.

We also have a couple of good over-ear wired headphones in our house, so I bought an adapter to be able to use them. I bought a no brand one for a few pounds off Amazon (just to try it out at first, really), so probably the DAC inside is not doing them justice, but they still sound great, much better than the buds. It still works fine now, so until it breaks, I'm pretty happy with it. If it breaks, I won't be happy with it, but then I'll probably get a better one.

For your sister, maybe try a different adapter if the connection's bad, assuming it's not filled with lint or something. Google assistant has only ever gotten in the way of everything for me, so don't enable it - not sure what to do about that.

I was dead against losing my 3.5mm jack, and tried to use a USB-to-3.5mm adaptor but it was poor, with issues like your sister experienced.

I finally decided to try a set of relatively cheap earplugs and I wish I'd done it sooner. They're lightweight, have good connectivity and a convenient charging case. I'm getting better quality audio and experience than I was with my 3.5mm jack - i'd have to replace my headsets every year or less as the wires got damaged over time, and the audio quality is actually better with my bluetooth earplugs. I used to avoid bluetooth after bad experiences over the years with audio drop out and connection issues, but I've not had any problems with my newer devices.

I'm not pretending they are audiophile quality but neither is 3.5mm audio in a phone - they just don't have good quality DACs in phones. Bluetooth is finally a decent and convenient step up for me for day-to-day use and I'm finally not as bothered about losing my 3.5mm port. It's also worth noting that if you want better audio, you can get bluetooth DACs and plug wired audio into those for an even better experience - I'm tempted but it's expensive and I'm not sure I'd appreciate the benefit enough to make it worthwhile for me.

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'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.

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

This is the downfall of all headphone jacks tbh

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!