I'm shopping around for a nice pair of earbuds for my Droid X since I lost my other ones, and I was curious if I could get ones with a microphone to use as a headset.
What do I need to look for to make sure they're compatible? Are all the 4-pin 3.5mm stereo jacks alike? If it's iPhone-compatible will it not be with the Droid (especially ones with remote volume buttons)?
Any 4-pin 3.5 mm stereo jack should work fine for straight sound but headsets with controls are a little more difficult. Many are proprietary. If it claims to be universal it may work but if it's designed for Apple or Nokia it probably wont.
Basically, on a 4-pin jack it all depends on which ring the headset maps to which control. I couldn't find a Droid X pinout diagram but I believe Motorola uses the standard layout. This site has a pretty comprehensive list of the different pinout mappings and a lot of them are the same but a lot are proprietary.
If in doubt, I'd look for a set advertised to work with the Droid X.
Here in India, we have Philips branded wired handsfree kits which are designed to be used with all modern phones. Certain phones require the jack to be plugged into a supplied female/male adapter which is then plugged into the 3.5mm jack of your phone.
This is the one I'm using with my Spica (the adapter also needs to be used) after the Samsung supplied ones conked out after a year of heavy duty use. ;-)
Perhaps you could find something similar...
