My Headphone Jack Fell Off


fomit

Member
Joined
Oct 15, 2005
Messages
288
Location
Seoul, Republic of Korea
Website
www.flickr.com
Well, it finally happened. I had been being very careful about the headphone jack. I have had to push the headphones in a little tightly to get sound since I got it, but today on the bus ride home I noticed no sound from the headphones. I was just getting sound from the speakers. I pushed a little harder thinking it wasn't tight. Low and behold the jack fell inside the unit. It now rattles quite nicely. I am now affraid to play it in case I short something.

It looks like my V001 unit will be going back to GPH anyways. Oh well. Hopefully it will come back to me in better than new condition.

Let this serve as a warning that, no matter how careful you are, if you have to push the headphones in tightly at all, the jack could become loose.

I wonder if they've fixed this fault in the later units?
 
Julius posted on Dec 2 2005 at 04:39 PM said:
I have a v201 and the Headphone-jack seems to be quite stable.

I have one of the early units and my headphone jack fell off aswell. Havent got round to soldering back in yet but it will be a simple job to do so. From what I have seen the later units have more soldering around the jack but Im not sure if they are glued in or not.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
It's an unfortunate fact that soldering in factory produced units tends to be quite poor.

It's always accepted therefore that any ports, dials or sockets should be secured to the board by more than solder. If the jack isn't bolted onto the board then that's a classic (and easily avoidable) design flaw right there.

I really hope that I don't have to solder anything back onto my unit.
 
They should really test these kind of things before shipping honestly :p Testing to see if they turn off/on isnt enough haha.
 
I honestly dont think its a design flaw, more a case of shitty soldering.
It could have another anchor on the board, but i know of many devices
with solder only mounting. They do not have these problems.

In any case, if mine breaks i'll just open it, clean contacts and resolder.
It does suck for other early adopters who do not have the technical ability
to fix it themselves. Im wondering if the simpleton at the factory soldering
the ports has been repremanded or not :D
 
grahf posted on Dec 2 2005 at 07:47 PM said:
I honestly dont think its a design flaw, more a case of shitty soldering.
It could have another anchor on the board, but i know of many devices
with solder only mounting. They do not have these problems.

In any case, if mine breaks i'll just open it, clean contacts and resolder.
It does suck for other early adopters who do not have the technical ability
to fix it themselves. Im wondering if the simpleton at the factory soldering
the ports has been repremanded or not :D

I do think it's a design flaw, soldering is for making electrical connections and not for making connections that are supposed to withstand any pulling or pushing forces when inserting or taking out the phone jack..... they should also have created another way of sticking the actual unit to the mother board so that it would withstand forces from using the plug.

Soldering just isn't meant to be used that way.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
As above, anyone with half a brain would realise that the jack is going to have some force put on it.

What kind of designers do gamepark have???? very poor IMO.
 
So 3 brains didnt know that pulling and pushing a jack onto two soldered pads isnt going to rip it off......come on mate as i said its very poor ( im not putting down the gp2x, ive one on order). Just stating that it is a very very poor design fault.
 
That's not really any excuse... they should be able to realise that a headphone jack IS GOING TO BE PUSHED IN! You shouldn't have to be really careful about doing something day to day like that, you shouldn't have to worry, whenever you plug the headphones in, that if you push it in firmly it may break... Man, I'm glad now that I'm (having to be) waiting to buy one. maybe GPH will have got their act together and cleared up some of the more obvious flaws like this...
 
everyone makes mistakes in the design sometimes.. i've soldered a couple power connectors back onto fujitsu-siemens laptop main boards, and that's a £1000 machine, not £120 :)
 
Back
Top