Saturday, February 02, 2008

Headset adapters for 2.5mm cell phones - a problem

I bought a two "HOSA" 3.5mm to 2.5mm headset adapters -- they cost almost $9 each with shipping.

They don't work with Emily's BlackBerry -- we only hear sound on one channel.

I then checked the BB site -- they sell their own adapter. Alas, an Amazon reviewer found the same problem with BlackBerry's own adapter!.

Extremely annoying. I wonder what the iPhone does.

2/4/08: I had slightly different results testing on a Nokia 6555b. I also noted that the Bose Communications Kit comes with four different 3.5mm to 2.5mm adapters -- each for different phones. So a 2.5mm to 3.5mm adapter may have to phone specific.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I've found that these adapters come in 2 flavors: One is a 2.5mm plug that are called "stereo" adapters. These are 3 conductor plugs. The conductors are usually for ground, left speaker and right speaker OR if you have a mic, they are for a ground, single mono speaker and a mic. You can recognize them because they only have one silver ring. The other flavor is a 2.5mm plug that has 4 conductors (ground, right speaker, left speaker and microphone). You can recognize these as they have 2 rings on the plug. If you search Amazon for "Original-Motorola-Adapter-Converter" you can see an example. That's probably want you want. If you want more info on the standards for these plugs, look up "TRS Connector" on wikipedia.