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Best Overall
Motorola Moto G 5G Power (2024)
Best Flagship Phones With the Jack
Asus ROG Phone 8 and Zenfone 11 Ultra
Best Under $200
Motorola Moto G Play 2024
The Creator’s Phone
Sony Xperia 1 V
It’s been Nearly eight years since Apple removed the headphone jack from the iPhone. Yes, you can get excellent wireless earbuds nowadays, but maybe you prefer plugging in or you don’t want to think about charging your headphones. The joy of the 3.5-mm headphone connector is that it’s one of the few universal standards left.
You can use any pair of corded headphones—no need to worry about whether they’re Lightning or USB-C or whether the connectivity will blip in and out. No batteries to charge, no dongles to attach, and no earbuds to lose (or earbud cases to run through the washing machine). There are times when Bluetooth is preferable, but it’s nice to have the option. As WIRED’s smartphone reviewer, I go through handsets big and small, cheap and expensive—these are the best with the venerable port. Read our Best Android Phones, Best iPhones, and Best Cheap Phones guides for more.
Updated June 2024: We’ve added the Moto G Stylus 5G 2024 and HMD Vibe.
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Photograph: Julian Chokkattu
Best Overall
Motorola Moto G 5G Power (2024)
Motorola’s Moto G Power 5G 2024 has it all (8/10, WIRED Recommends). Wireless charging? Yep. NFC so you can tap-to-pay with your phone? Sure thing. Headphone jack? You bet. It only costs $300, but its performance is pretty smooth, with some blips here and there when you juggle a lot of apps. The main camera takes some decent photos, but the display is sharp and bright (with a 120-Hz refresh rate).
The main downside is that there’s no official IP water-resistant rating. It’s water-repellent, so it’ll be OK in the rain, but you’ll want to baby it when you’re around the pool. It will also only get one Android OS update (up to Android 15), though Motorola is promising three years of security updates. It’ll stay secure, you just won’t enjoy new Android features and bug fixes for long.
★ Alternative: If you can spend a tiny bit more, the Moto G Stylus 5G 2024 ($400) is similar but offers slightly better performance, nicer cameras, and packs an OLED display for deeper blacks and richer colors. It comes with a stylus housed in the bottom of the phone you can use to sign documents, doodle, or take notes.
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Photograph: Julian Chokkattu
Asus ROG Phone 8 and Zenfone 11 Ultra
Asus is one of the few Android manufacturers that still include the headphone jack on all their phones. This year, there’s the Asus ROG Phone 8 and the Zenfone 11 Ultra. I’ve bundled them together because they are basically identical. They both have the headphone jack, an IP68 water-resistance rating, 6.78-inch AMOLED screens with the same resolution, and the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset with 12 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage (upgradeable to 16 GB and 512 GB). Even the 5,500-mAh battery capacity is identical, as is the triple-camera system, with a 50-MP main camera, a 13-MP ultrawide, and a 32-MP telephoto. The photos they capture are solid, though nothing to write home about. There are better camera phones at these prices.
The ROG Phone 8 is tailored to gamers, so it has a bit more flair in its design, and its screen refresh rate can get up to 165 Hz, but this is pretty much overkill. It also has two USB-C ports, one on the bottom and one on the left edge, so you can charge your phone more easily without a cable blocking your grip when gaming. The best reason to get the ROG model is if you plan on investing in Asus’ gaming accessories, like the ROG AeroActive Cooler X, which genuinely lowers the operating temperature of the phone when gaming, delivering smoother frame rates and gameplay over long periods. The Zenfone 11 Ultra is just … a big flagship Android phone with a headphone jack. It’s a completely fine handset, but there’s not much that stands out about it. (Just remember that these phones do not work on Verizon’s network.)
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Photograph: Julian Chokkattu
Best Under $200
Motorola Moto G Play 2024
If your budget is tight, the Moto G Play 2024 is a surprisingly great handset with good enough performance that won’t make you want to rip your hair out. It doesn’t have NFC, so you can’t make any contactless payments, there’s only 4G LTE support, and it will only receive one software update (to Android 14), but you get a large 6.5-inch LCD that gets bright enough to read in sunny conditions, and decently snappy performance. The 5,000-mAh battery can easily go past a single day on a charge.
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Photograph: Sony
The Creator’s Phone
Sony Xperia 1 V
The Xperia series has become a weird lineup in the past few years as Sony keeps bumping up the price. The preceding model hit an absurd $1,600 MSRP, and it doesn’t even fold! The price isn’t as high anymore with the Xperia 1 V (7/10, WIRED Recommends), but it’s still stupidly expensive at $1,200. Sure, you get a 4K-resolution OLED screen, a grippy and narrow screen (it’s very tall), the headphone jack, a microSD card slot, and the top-end Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor from 2023. It even has many photographer-friendly features, like a physical camera button, manual mode for video and photo, and tons of settings you can tweak to get the perfect shot.
However, the results from the camera (if you’re not a shutterbug) are just not as good as other phones in this price range. Sony’s imaging software is also clunky and confusing—you really have to play around with the settings to get good results. It doesn’t help that the company only promises one more Android OS upgrade with two more years of security updates. You should expect better at this price. Try and catch it on sale if you want one. It’s worth noting that Sony has announced a successor, the Xperia 1 VI, but it isn’t coming to the US.
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Photograph: Julian Chokkattu
Other Phones to Consider
Honorable Mentions
Samsung Galaxy A15 5G ($200): I had high expectations for this Samsung smartphone, especially after I liked last year’s A14 so much. Alas, its performance is lackluster this year, far laggier than the Motorola Moto G Play above. That said, it does have 5G, NFC for contactless payments, and longer software support—four Android upgrades and five years of security updates. Its cameras are also a bit more capable. If you don’t mind a bit of sluggishness, it’s more feature packed.
HMD Vibe for $150: The two good things about this HMD phone are its price and performance—it runs OK once it’s set up and going. Oh, and it has a headphone jack and microSD card slot. Outside of that, this phone will not get any Android updates (just two years of security updates), there’s no 5G connectivity, no NFC for contactless payments, and even no fingerprint sensor. My review has more details.
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Photograph: Apple
If You Lost the Jack
Dongle Life
Sorry iPhone owners. None of Apple’s phones have a headphone jack, and that includes the iPhone SE. You’ll have to make do with a headphone dongle. The options below should work. And if you have an Android phone that lacks the jack, we have a nice pair of USB-C earbuds we like.
For iPhone: Apple Lightning to 3.5-mm Adapter for $7 and Apple USB-C to 3.5-mm Adapter for $8. If you want to be safe and stick with Apple-branded cables, this simple adapter will let you quickly plug your cans into your iPhone. I recommend buying a few because they’re easy to lose.
For Android: If you just want an adapter so you can use your headphones, the same Apple USB-C to 3.5-mm adapter will do the job. Alternatively, you can also use Google’s USB-C Earbuds ($30). They sound decent, and you can get Google Assistant to read out notifications when your phone is in your pocket.
For the car: If you’re like me and have an older car without Bluetooth and have had mixed results with dongles, I recommend Scosche’s FM Transmitter ($20). Plug this into your car’s 12-volt port, and turn on your FM radio to the station displayed on the device’s screen. Once you pair your smartphone to it via Bluetooth, your music will transmit over the air to the FM station, almost exactly as if your car had Bluetooth. It’s seamless, and this comes with a 3.5-mm cable that goes from this device to your car’s auxiliary port.
