Earlier today a rendering of the upcoming HTC Bolt was leaked and for the most part, it looked a lot like the HTC 10 save for some minor design differences. However it seems that it might also be missing one key element: a headphone jack. This was initially brought up by @LlabTooFeR and was subsequently retweeted by Evan Blass, indicating that he might be right.
From the rendering it’s hard to tell whether the phone has a headphone jack simply because it does not show us the top or bottom part of the phone, so it’s really anyone’s guess at this point, but @LlabTooFeR and Blass have been known to be pretty spot on with their leaks so perhaps there’s some truth there.
We should point out that HTC won’t be the first Android OEM to ditch the headphone jack. There have been at least three Android OEMs in the past who have done so, such as Oppo, LeEco, and Motorola, so really, HTC won’t be the right and if anything, this seems to be an indication of the industry moving away from an old standard in favor of a newer one: USB-C.
There has been a bit of an outrage regarding the headphone port when Apple decided to ditch it on their iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, but oddly enough there are no complaints when others did it. Like we said, it seems to be a shift towards a new standard and last we heard, Samsung could follow suit with the Galaxy S8 but we’ll have to wait and see.