It has become difficult to find a flagship phone in the US with a headphone jack. The old 3.5mm plugs seem to be déclassé to high-end vendors, which want you to go wireless.

Plug the phone cord leading from the wall phone jack into the phone-line socket on the base unit. Plug the base unit into an electrical outlet. Turn on the power.

This means that you can plug the FreeLaces into your P30 phone (or any USB-C port) for charging. If it is a Huawei device (or presumably even an Honor phone) HiPair, the company's newest random ...

But the old plug-and-socket combination - the jack - has been around in one form or another for more than a hundred years. Jonathan Sterne of McGill University is here to tell us about it.