HTC's 'Googlephone,' the G-1, has many faults, but the one causing the most fuss is the lack of a proper 3.5mm headphone jack. Instead, the headphones plug into a proprietary USB-headphone port on the bottom, so you're pretty much stuck with either the (almost certainly) crappy earbuds that ship with the phone, or you'll have to buy a dongle to act as a go-between.
Why, HTC, why? It is at least understandable when manufacturers deviate from some standards, but this makes no sense to us at all. Sony, famous for making up its own versions of everything, usually acts to protect and promote its own products. That's why Sony Ericsson phones use MemorySticks instead of SD cards, for example.
But the history of connections has left us with some curious appendages, some of which need to have their cables snipped in a kind of electronic vasectomy guaranteed to keep them out of the gadget gene pool. Read on for Gadget Lab's picks for the most annoying connectors ever.
Photo credit: e-magic/Flickr
HTC's ExtUSB Port
The HTC-built G1 phone from T-Mobile eschews a 3.5mm headphone port in favor of something called an ExtUSB port. Apparently this is some kind of a standard, but it's one that none of us at the Gadget Lab has ever seen or heard of before. Even if it is a widely accepted standard, just try shopping for a set of headphones with an ExtUSB jack.
Photo credit: Engadget
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__Recessed or Hidden Headphone Jacks
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HTC isn’t the only one to do this. Apple shipped the first iPhone with a standard 3.5mm jack socket, but recessed it so that you couldn’t fit in a normal set of headphones without an adapter (or a scalpel). My brother visited recently and brought his Samsung phone with him. Again, no jack, but at least the mini USB headphone cable broke in the middle to reveal a 3.5mm jack and socket, allowing a somewhat clunky route to better sound.
The only reason seems to be space. If you buy a jack socket from an electronics store, you’ll see that it is big. All-in-one charger/input/output interfaces are easier to fit into a tiny cellphone.
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Banana plugs
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These once ubiquitous speaker connection plugs slot into the binding posts found on most speakers. The problem? They also fit quite easily into European power outlets, which led to them being banned on new equipment. You might think that nannying Britain had something to do with this, but the paranoid belt-and-braces design of the UK power outlet keeps two flaps closed over the conducting holes unless there is a third earthing pin present, keeping the Tea Drinkers safe from such menaces.
Photo credit: iharfilipau/Flickr
PS/2
The PS/2 connector should no longer exist. Used only for connecting keyboards and mice to old computers, it has staggered on for 13 years longer than it should: USB was first introduced in 1995. There is everything to hate about these legacy connectors: The colors chosen to differentiate keyboard and mouse cables are hideous shades of green and mauve — colors even the pastel-curious 1980s couldn’t love.
Add to this the fact that the sockets are invariably buried around the back of a desktop machine and there is no way to know by feel alone which way around they fit and you have a recipe for both frustration and bent pins.
Power Bricks
Power adapters might all plug in to the same wall socket, but on the other end they are all seemingly different, and there is a real danger if you grab the wrong one: you could fry the DC-in board of your gadget with too high a voltage, or you could hook up a cable that is exactly the same as the correct one except that the current comes in through the outside of the plug, instead of the inside.
We don’t know what to suggest here. Clearly a standard plug would be great, but which one to choose? Apple’s Magsafe connector is quite brilliant, the idea lifted from the detachable safety cables on deep-fat fryers, but it is patented up the wazoo. Add to this the different voltages required by different machines, and we’re left in a pickle.
One Plug to Rule Them All
What’s the answer? USB. The name even contains several letters of the word “ubiquitous”, although in an order only a Scrabble player could love. Sure, the 5-volt output won’t power a laptop, but it can handle phones, MP3 players and sexually active robot dogs. In fact, USB is getting close to being the standard charging cable -- even some airlines include them in their seat-back media centers.
If one thing is certain, it's that standards cannot be mandated. MP3 became widespread because it worked with everything. USB is the same. Despite our friendly disdain for the seemingly endless supply of USB-powered tat, this is one bus we love even more than the now sadly defunct Routemaster.
