[lips]

"If you look at the previous generation of phones, things like Nokia phones, you had to have an adapter," he reasons. "If you want to connect headphones to professional equipment, you also need a professional adapter."

No, this was (for the most part) an anomaly. (Sony loved this crap.)

And the "adapter" you need for professional gear costs all of .25, unless you want to plug your headphones into BNC, then it's maybe 1$ in parts and 15 minutes at your bench.

[e12e]

Funny thing. My old sony-ericcson phone was the first that came with a hands-free that had a separate minijack above the mic, so you could use any headset with the (wired) handsfree (and it also had a standard "long" minijack for control+mic+output).

Sony made a couple of brilliant mp3 players with proper line out for a while - until Sony Music got upset about "piracy", and apparently the ensuing battle within Sony killed a lot of great products. Which turned out to be a net loss, as was obvious to anyone - it happened that Apple took the marked with the iPod, but it was obvious someone would).