On Feb 19, 11:40*pm, Tom Anderson wrote:

On Sat, 19 Feb 2011, Mizter T wrote:

On Feb 19, 12:57pm, Tom Anderson wrote:

On Fri, 18 Feb 2011, Steve Dulieu wrote:

Sony PRS 350? smaller than a Kindle, no web browser, hold about 2K
books. has got a basic music player but headphone only so no annoying
your fellow travellers.

Is there any reason *all* mobile devices couldn't or shouldn't be
headphone-only for music, and indeed everything except phone calls? If
the EU can regulate device makers into all providing MicroUSB, maybe
they can regulate them into that too.

Why "except phone calls"?

Because it would be a monstrous pain to have to put my earphones in every
time someone phoned me! On top of which, the sound output during a phone
call is not usually loud or sustained enough to be annoying (unlike
music), so there's nothing to be gained by forcing phone calls to go
through earphones.

I was thinking about the delightful speakerphone function, but I see
that my sloppy reading of your comment and my subsequent response has
taken us down a delightful avenue of confusion!

So, to be clear, I wasn't wishing to promote everyone walking around
the streets looking like made people talking to themselves, for that
is what headset phonecall making folk still look like to me.

(Yes, speakerphone has its legitimate uses - for instance it's great
for turning an effective one-to-one communications medium, the phone
call, into a confusing many-to-one babble, which is handy when one has
had enough of effectively communicating and wishes to move on into the
realm of a cacophony of unintelligible noise, as I find is so often
the case.)