Want to listen to some music on the AT&T Quickfire? Good luck with that.

Greg Kumparak

Greg Kumparak is the Mobile Editor at Techcrunch. Greg has been writing for the TechCrunch network since May of 2008. Greg was born just outside of San Jose, and now lives in the East Bay of California. → Learn More

Tuesday, November 25th, 2008

It’s not all that uncommon for handset manufacturers to forego the simplicity of a standard 3.5mm headset jack, instead opting for some clunky proprietary port. To take off a bit of the sting, they’ll generally include some sort of crappy-port-to-3.5mm adapter – or at the very least, they’ll stick a cheapo pair of compatible headphones in the box in hopes that no one cares that they sound horrible.

Not the AT&T Quickfire, though. Sure, it’s got that nasty proprietary port (pictured above), and a relatively solid set of music functionality (Music playback in at least 8 formats, music purchases, music identification, XM music, etc) – but they included neither an adapter nor crummy headphones in the box. To make things worse, it doesn’t look like AT&T even sells the required adapter. If you want to make use of the Quickfire’s music features without annoying everyone around you, you’ll have to turn to third-party resellers.

Of course, you could always use a pair of stereo bluetooth headphones – but if you’re using a $70 dollar pair of headphones with a $99 dollar phone, you’re 10 kinds of weird. Get it straight, handset manufacturers: If you’re going to push audio out through a crappy proprietary format, include a 3.5mm adapter. If you don’t, every single music feature on the device is pretty much useless.

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