bl80

I have found a couple threads with similar issues.. but my main question is how to approach Verizon to ensure I get a replacement phone.

My headphone jack is junk. it is loose.. if I shift slightly it cuts off. Stops Pandora (or whatever music app I am using) and I have to press PLAY to get it going again.

Also.. if i wiggle it, my music application launches. Seriously. very very odd.

And.. If I use my headphones and disconnect them, I often get no audio thru my regular phone speaker until I do a reboot of the device.

I found a few threads detailing these exact same issues. If I go to the Verizon store do I need to print these out? Anything that might make it more justified that they get me a new device??

Any experience on how to deal with issues like this? thanks for any help/advice you can provide.

-bryan-

G.Armour

If it is really bad loose, just take into a Verizon store and show them what the problem is, the technician may compare yours to another Droid, and may compare your headphones as well, but if they determine that it is cause it is indeed your Droid that is bad, they will replace it because it came with a one year manufacture warranty.

Sent from my Droid using Tapatalk

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SinfulDragon

tell them what you just said here, its under the 1 year warranty, shouldn't be an issue, new one in the mail (well, "Like New")

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Oh my god, it works.... like its suppose to!!!
Is it suppose to do THAT?!?!?!

soulesschild

I've had this issue and I got a brand new Droid. Still is all jacked up occasionally (I find the more I use it, the more loose it becomes). Hence why I bought a Zune instead for my music purposes =/

bl80

i rarely use it as an audio device.. that is what is so crazy about this. I might use it via my 3.5mm jack into my car stereo for Pandora on occasion when I am bored of my sirius radio.

at my desk at work i have a pc running pandora.

i have an ipod nano for music at the gym. i really do not use the headphone jack in the phone that much..

thanks for the advice.. heading to VZN store in a bit to see whats what.

-B-

silkchaos

I found when i dropped the cash for a good set of headphones, I actually stopped having issues.

teschoen

Maybe that is why I don't have the issue. I have a very nice set of headphones that fit very tightly in the device. I also don't use any force when I plug/unplug the phones.

skunkpbguy

+1
Don't blame your device for your cheap accessories.. just sayin.

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ssantan2

I had the same problem on my first two droids, now I am on my third. Haven't tried it out but its annoying that its such a design flaw. I know for a fact it wasn't my headphones since I bought a pair of nice headphones and it went away for a day and then started again but worse. In my case I had all the symptoms the OP had but also there was an issue that if my headphones were in and I shook the phone it would do a global shuffle to another song and keep the global shuffle setting on. Thats when I knew i needed a new one. Called verizon and they shipped on to me within 3 days delivered.

teschoen

I'm not sure it is a design flaw, otherwise all of us would have this issue.......

Just sayin......

silkchaos

Actually, my understanding is that its not a true "headphone" jack in the way most music players are. instead of connection "rings" all the way around at the correct points, there are just three wires that touch the plug.. So it is a design issue.

But better headphones did help me. Cheap ones didn't make as good of a connection to the wires i suppose.

jmt9779

This is true. And it's a VERY widespread problem. It's just a poor design.

Out of curiosity, what headphones are you guys referring to as "good" (read: good enough to address this problem) and how much cash did you drop on them?

silkchaos

By good, I know I am not talking top of the line. I picked up a set of ipod earphones on sale for $21.99

jmt9779

lol. okay. well, i have a pair of $50 skullcandy's and i still have the "cutting out" problem. i was just wondering if you guys were talking about $200 headphones or something...

snapcase

I had this issue with my first droid. I took it in to the verizon store, and they came up with a mountain of excuses... Even going so far as to blame me after clearly stating that it was a problem with the phone. They did compare it to another droid... The one belonging to one of the employees that had clearly been in use for a while (it looked like hell).

Despite admitting that the phone was faulty three times (I was counting), they still wouldn't replace it. It wasn't until I finally got pissed off that they gave me a new droid. After they basically called me a liar I kinda lost it and started yelling (and eventually let slip loose a little profanity). The gave me the replacement just to get rid of me. Needless to say I'll never go to that store again.

All in all they jerked me around in that store for about three hours between having "techs" take it in back several times and sitting around waiting for them to come up with a new excuse (or a new person to deliver said excuse ). I was still in my initial 30 days when all this went down.

And by the way, the new droid has no problems with the headphone jack.

I've heard that it's much easier to return a phone with their phone support. I don't remember the number, but as I recall it's operated by a third party rather than verizon so they don't give you such a hard time.

Last edited by snapcase; April 8th, 2010 at 07:28 PM.

ssantan2

I went to the store and they did the same thing to me. I called phone support and they sent one very quickly. was on the phone for no more then 20 minutes including hold time.

The headphones I use are a pair UE's in ears, pair of JVC and sennheiser over the ear ones which are very good construction and sound wise so I can vouch this was definitely the phones fault.

sol93gt

Ingnore the people who always say well since I don't have that problem, it's not the phones fault. That pisses me off just as much as the Verizon manager who told me she uses her headphones ...almost ...every day when I walk my dog. I wanted to bitch slap her, while I was thinking "what on God's green Earth does that have to do with me?" And this was right after I told her this was my second Droid for the exact same problem, it was like she wasn't listening to anthing I said. Then she had the ignorant nerve to ask me if I had tried a different set of headphones. This is when I snapped and said "yeah at least a half dozen including a set that cost $70. Just before I was about to go apeshit on her, a rep walks out from the back, and I mumbled do you know about the Droid headset problem? I mumbled because I was just about to shove my foot up the managers ass, and he said "ohh yeah , mine does the same thing, the headphone jack in these are junk". So I looked at the Manager with disgust and said "is that enough to convince you or do you want me to show you the hundreds of people online I have bookmarked in my phone complaining about the same thing?" She says they would have to mail you a refurbished phone. Then I shoved my phone in her face and said "this replacement phone was brand f'ing new given to me by one of the other store managers, and said his name. Then asked her if she knew what a warrenty is, and they can take their refurb and shove it..................." Ohh and not to mention they didn't have any droid 1's in stock, even though pretty recently it was the best selling phone in America. It's nice to be able to tell people I don't work for Verizon anymore. I put up with managements bs for 9 years and basically told all of them they were incompetent. F verizon and the horse they rode in on!

Eugene

I've noticed that seems to be a tolernace issue. I have a couple pair of headphones that fit great as well as a casette adapter for my truck that fits fine. But I have one that fits loose. It seems Motorola just made the jack at one end of the tolerance and some headphones are at the other end. Find a store with a good return policy and buy a headphone and if its loose return it and buy another. Stay away from the fad brands, Apple's iphad, skull candy, etc which are really cheap quaility and the price of them is paying for marketing. Mine are Koss. They work just fine, through PA highways (bump bump, bump bump, bump bump due to them being improperly surfaced), Dirt roads in WV, off roading on the farm. Enough of a bump to make the car dock come off the window but the headphone plug stayed tight and kept playing.

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takeshi

Not true at all and it's certainly not an uncommon issue. There are certainly plenty examples of design flaws that don't fail in every single instance if you bother to look around.

sol93gt

Thank you, some with some common sense. No offense to the guy who thinks KOSS are high quality, you can get those at CVS. The only thing that matters here is that it is an audio output jack that was designed for 3.5mm headphones, or what ever you want to put in it that has a 3.5mm size. You can't get Sennheiser $100 HD headphones at CVS. I got them on sale at CompUSA, I believe they where on sale for $79.99 I tried around 6 different headphones and 3.5mm acessories, no dice. It has absolutely nothing to do with the acessories. If I find a pair of Koss headphones that makes the problem go away temporarilly, how the hell am I going to play the MP3's on my SD card on my 1200 watt Onkyo system that feeds 7 speakers and 3 12" powered subwoofers, and if anyone thinks over 2000 watts of high end audio equipment is overkill, don't bother complaining. That's what I enjoy listening to, if that's not what you like, terrific. Point is yes there are other ways to do it but I'm holding a $600 smartphone that has a 3.5mm jack that keeps going bad. Its a design flaw period, I can buy a $5 MP3 player and never have the same problem, but everytime I get a new Droid, eventually it goes bad, if it was the very expensive acessories I was using all along, when I got a new Droid the problem wouldn't show up again 3 months later with a loose jack, crackling and loosing audio on one side, or making the microphone you use during a call only work if I have the headphones plugged in. There are multiple problems this design flaw causes and anyone with 15 mins to spare can talk to your Android phone and do some reasearch on Google. I just love how some people like to argue about a problem they don't themselves experience and haven't spent anytime researching it. Think before posting something that you know doent make sense. There's no reason why I shouldn't be able to use my $600 piece of fabulous technology, with only a set of Koss headphones. This issue is rediculous, Verizon should either fix the problem, or discontinue the device. I'd be willing to bet money when I get my DroidX I won't have this problem.

Eugene

I didn't say Koss was quality, what they are is not a fad brand so you get what you pay for with them and are not paying for a brand/marketing name on top of a crap pair. So a $20 pair of koss is a $20 pair, where a $50 pair of skull candy is a $5 pair with a fancy brand on top of it. koss just happens to be the brand that I have which fits fine. My other set are the ones that came with my work blackberry, they fit fine and work fine too as well as whatever brand the casette adapter was that I stuck in my truck radio (pulled the faceplate off the radio to feed the wire in behind it so I can't eject it to see the brand. Now the $2 extension I bought from ebay fits a little loose.

/OT your expensive system, can you hear a quility difference between mp3 and a cd or something encoded in a loseless format like flac? I have a decent sound system at home, nothing as fancy as what you have but I wonder if the small loss of an mp3 is now noticeable. I actaully ordered a CD for the first time in a while so I could rip it myself and play the mp3 and cd right after each other and see if I can tell the difference, if so then I'm going back to cd's and will start ripping them myself into a lossless format.

Gunner

I'm still searching for a 3.5mm male-to-male cable for use in the car that will actually stay plugged in. Have tried several. I have a relatively cheap set of Sony NC headphones that have a tight fit; the jack doesn't fall out at all.

slider5634

If you have a decerning ear, you absolutely can hear the difference. Even with a slightly less expensive system. I'm running Sony specialty series component system speakers (front and back) w/ Ribbon tweeters and the difference is amazing. I took a CD and compressed it down to 256Kbps MP3 format and listened to the same song back to back (CD first, MP3 second) and I couldn't believe it. Sometimes you can tell where the sound range cutoff is. Sometimes you can hear the a crackling sound with the amount of sound being processed all at once (say 8-9 instruments really loud all at once + vocals). I generally don't get those issues listening straight from the CD. Oddly enough, I've also noticed the compression on music I buy from iTunes (which is NOT MP3) seems to be of excellent quality; I'm not sure if they use a lossless compression or not.

On Topic, I felt blessed my first Droid didn't run into this. However, my refurb seems to have a relatively mild case of this issue. In my case, the plug on my cheapo jensen ear buds slide in and out far too easily. I'm pleased to say that my nicer Sony earbuds have not suffered the same issue.

sol93gt

I apologize Eugene if I offended you in any way, I was just try to make the point that there should be no reason what so ever that any cord that has a 3.5mm end on it shouldn't work flawlessly in our $600 piece of marelous technology. I misswored what I was trying to say about the Koss headphones. I'm glad you don't have to deal with this problem, and in my opinion cd's are a step backwards in technology when compaired to using mp3's. You can get high quality mp3's for free from apps in the Android market. Yes I could use cd's, I could burn custom cd's with only the songs I like, but new albums and songs come out every day. And if I can get them for free and store 500, 1000, mp3's on my fabulous Droid that was for a while the best selling smarttphone money could buy in the entire world, why would I waste my time and money going the other route? I've also tried 4 different sets of bluetooth stereo headsets, but have only found one set that seal well enough to hear the bass as it was intened to be heard when that music artist made that song or album. That was the second set of Motorola's S9-HD that I've owned, the first set eventually died after a year, because I accidently overchared the battery too many times and lost all thr replacement earbuds and at the time you couldn't get replacements from Motorola or ebay like you can now. That's a design flaw that about drove me nuts fro the earbuds falling off, but I would have used a little bit of common sense, 2 drops of supergle would have fixed that, and the new ones are still the same. But I had to return them because of the lying seller on ebay not putting in their ad they were refurbished. There is a nice set of Sony 2 piece, bass series the guy at Radio Shack let me listen to. And I also use my Droid in the car pluged into the aux input to listen to my MP3's through the stereo since its illegal to drive with headphones on, for good reeasons. And that requires a 3.5mm male to male cord. So basically what I'm trying to say is I listen to music and watch videos a lot, especially now that I have Froyo 2.2 update number 2 which includes Adobe Flash 10.1, which is so nice I can't put it into words. I feel sorry for any iPone or Ipod owner. And I did say in my last post that there are other ways to go about listening to my music, but there is no excuse for Verizon not fixing this problem. And for the people that have never experienced this issue, stop replying to this thread and sit down at you computer or use your phone to get online to see how many people are having the same problem. And I gaurentee you I use my hole with 3 wires in it on my droid a lot more than you do. So much I wouldn't mind it surgically implanted in my arm and wired directly to my brain.lol I'm not trying to start an argument with anyone on here, just trying to get you guys to understand this is a real problem that Verizon is not addressing. Take care guys.

sol93gt

Give it some time I'll bet $20 the Sony's will eventually start doing the same thing, remember because Verizon wanted a feature that pauses your music when the wire is pulled out, we don't have a headset jack, we have a hole with 3 wires in it, that was talked about earlier in this thread. Let me know when your Sony's start doing the same thing your other headset is doing now....

Last edited by sol93gt; September 3rd, 2010 at 01:01 PM.

Eugene

IIRC Apple/itunes uses an an mp4 encoded AAC or something like that which can be lossy or lossless so if you get good quality from them its probably a loseless song, Apple is one company I'd never give any $ to though.
No offense taken, I just wanted to clairify what I meant, sometimes I'm misunderstood.
The issue with the jack isn't with quality, its about tolerances in manufacturing. If you go to Homedepot and buy some 2x4s (1.5"x3.5") and measure them you'll find that one is 1.502x3.502 and another could be 1.497x3.501 etc. Headphone jacks and plugs are the same, they are not all 3.5mm, you have to have a little bit of difference in the jack and plug to allow them to fit. So every mechanical spec will be published with an allowable tolerance, the 3.5mm could be +/- 10% and motorola made the jack at +10% while some plugs are at -10% so they fit loose.
I don't have a real fancy system ay home, its a samsung blueray home theater ~$500 but I'm wondering if lossless will sound better in it.
I'm thinking of getting a BT heatset anyway, I remmber someone had one that was like a normal headset with one speaker and the mic and then you added the other speaker for when you wanted to listen to music.
I want to get a BT receiver for my truck but that means either replacing the whole radio which requires an adapter or a bluetooth to line and then line adater for the existing radio so either way its not cheap. Or tear into the existing radio and find the end of the casette preamp and make that a line in.
I've not found anywhere to buy any loseless music, Amazon said they have no plan to so it.

sol93gt

I understand what you mean Eugene, the prolem is, we have a hole with 3 wires in it that elongates its circumfrence over time and usage, which in my opinion is a design flaw. Look at a droid2, its not the same. We shouldn't have to be jumping through hoops to listen to our music, even if its a $5 headset. A normal MP3 would never give you these problems, because it has a stardard headset jack. We don't have that on the Droid1. Verizon should demmand Motorola fix it or they will stop selling it. And I'll emphisize this one last time, this is a $600 marval of technology, that shouldn't have any kind of problem like this.

Last edited by sol93gt; September 3rd, 2010 at 01:25 PM. Reason: misspelling

Eugene

You saying over time and usage, so was yours fine when you first got it. I wonder if you have a particular headset that is a little large and stretching the contacts. I've used mine with a headphone all the time at work, in my truck on longer drives, etc. My microUSB port is actually getting a little loose from being plugged and unplugged so much but the headset jack is fine.

I ripped one of my CD's to flac and through my cheap headphones I can't tell a difference between that and mp3. I need to steal my flash drive back from my son and see if my nice system will even play flac.

craiglester

It's not a case of stretching the contacts per se.. the contacts that touch the jack plug seem secure enough.. if you look
*HERE*
you'll see in the upper left that the headphone jack isn't attached to the board, but the case.. and in the lower right (look for the orange rectangle near the sd card) is the board it presses against.

For some reason Motorola thought not soldering the two pieces, but merely relying on contact via sprung pins, would be a better idea.

Mine failed after a month or so, became horribly scratchy and would cut out or skip songs with no movement. I got a refurb and have used bluetooth exclusively since then. No more jack issues

obutto

Yeah...I purchased some Etymotic MC5's compared to my crap headphones that I used before (Creative EP-630's). I've burned in my headphones but now I'm noticing that they sound like crap on my Droid...My volume keeps shifting up and down when I spin the jack by mistake and it skips a lot. Is my headphone jack getting messed uP?

Krislawl

I have a pair of klipsch image s4 earbuds and this exact same thing happens to me. When I go jogging sometimes the sound completely blanks out, or it spurts static out in different ears, etc.

sol93gt

I did say using the same acessories all along, after 3 months of usage, the problem would come back. So yes Eugene it worked perfectly when new. I have never seen anything like this in any other "computer audio input, or output/headset jack" in any of the dozen devices I've used over the past 10 years, using most of the same acessories all along, except in my Droid, as it was so eliquently pointed out by craiglester. That you sir. Followed by yet another 2 more people eventually running into the same problems by using this audio output blackhole, that motorola refuses to fix. My wife's Droid Eris hunk of crap, that I also had for a month before trading it in for the Droid1 has never had the same problem, and the both of us have been using it for a year. And no I didn't pay the $35 restocking fee after I said, $35 restocking fee? Ahh no I won't be paying that fee, because I'm going to have a 30 second chat with your Manager about how bad you're customer service is in the store and by phone, and I will be walking out of here with a brand new Droid1, not a refurb. And that's exactly what happened. And if anybody else on here is getting railroaded by Verion FIOS or Wireless, grow a set of balls. Seeing people talk about what we should have to do to get around a problem that Motorola created, in a device 1000 times more advanced than the lunar modual that put men on the moon (NASA themselves have said that computer was less advanced than a calculator watch) makes my ulcer bleed. So now that we're all clear on what a crappy design flaw this is, I bid you fellows a farewell, and don't take Verizon's crap. Put your foot down and demand what should rightfully be done. Later guys.