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Rick asked: “Purchased an iPhone 8 and didn’t realize it didn’t have a jack for listening to music. Is there a way to charge the iPhone 8 at the same time, while listening to music? The battery doesn’t last very long and I have to stop playing the music, charge my phone, then restart the music later. It’s frustrating. I’m not too good with that Bluetooth stuff either.”
Rick, you’re trying to plug two things into your phone at once! You must be crazy… according to Apple at least.
Lucky for you, you can avoid Bluetooth if you want to by buying an adapter that will either split your lightning port into two lightning ports, or into a lightning port for charging and a stereo output that you can plug your regular headphones into.
Depending on the one you buy, it can cost you as little as $7 or as much as maybe $35 or $40 for a brand name like Belkin.
Alternatively, you can buy a Qi charger and set your phone down on it to charge while you plug your headphones directly into the phone.
Alternatively, you can buy a Qi charger
Qi chargers are fairly inexpensive, you can find them for as little as $10, though they can go up in price to $50 or more. The more expensive chargers are usually meant for several devices at once, so you can probably get away with one of the cheaper ones.
If you’re ever tempted to give Bluetooth a try, once you pair your Bluetooth device, you’re pretty much set. You’d just turn on your headphones and they’d connect, turn them off and they’d disconnect. It’s a pretty user-friendly technology.
Unfortunately, the removal of the headphone jack is probably going to continue to be an expanding trend. In fact, Apple didn’t even start it, Motorola did with the Moto Z a few months before Apple. After Apple, HTC followed, Motorola doubled down with the Z2, and of course, Google removed it on their Pixel and Pixel 2 lines, so there’s a good chance that we’re going to keep seeing more brands removing the headphone jack as people get more and more adjusted to the idea.