Quick Project: 1/8" stereo adapter for my phone

My Wife's EnV Touch has a 1/8" jack, higher-res webcam with auto-focus, a better browser and a few other features I really wish this one had. I'm just not a fan of touch-screen phones.

I'm not sure why they went with the dinky 1/16" jack on the Env3, and I'm getting tired of using whatever 1/16" stereo headphones I can find with all of my phones. I want to use whatever headphones are laying around! All of the 1/16" adapters I've found only have 3 contacts, which means they don't quite line up right with the 4-contact jack (Common, left, right, and microphone) found on many mobile phones and result in only getting one of the two stereo channels. This isn't acceptable to me. I needed something better.

I gutted a portable DVD player that broke, and un-soldered a headphone jack. I also scavenged some other parts from it for later, such as the speakers, various two-color LEDs, switches and a few SMT components.

I also found a stereo mobile phone headset in a parking lot a few weeks back. The headphones had been run over and are useless. I cut them off, then soldered the new headphone jack to the wires. Common (usually plain copper color) goes to the highest ring. Left and right go to the other ring and the tip respectively. Or maybe I have left and right reversed. I'm not one to care.

I used heat shrink tubing to hold the entire assembly together. The end result still has a microphone built in, so I can now use any 1/8" headphone as a stereo headset with my new phone.

Total cost: $0.00. The entire thing was built from junk parts and expendable materials I had laying around, such as shrink tube and solder. I'm pretty sure this will find its way to There, I Fixed It.