This article is misleading. While it is true that almost every smartphone has an FM radio on the SoC, it's not true that it's always up to the carriers to enable the radio. Many unsupported phones are lacking the trace between the FM input to the headset jack, meaning this issue can't be fixed in a software update.
> Samsung, Apple and LG are among those who have not switched on the chip, but HTC and Motorola chips haven't been blocked, Smulyan says. Sprint has turned on the FM chip for phones on its network.
It seems like they're citing manufacturers as well as carriers. Since many major carriers order variants of phone models specific to their network, it's not out of the question that either could be responsible for the lockout, even if it is at the hardware level.
Even if the chip supports FM, does the phone have an FM antenna?
I seem to remember that my old pre-MP3 devices used the headphone cable as the antenna. Would it be easy to have good reception in a smartphone without using a headphone cable?
Given how I use my smartphone using Bluetooth speakers for music and seldom headphones, I doubt that the FM chip would work for me. (And if I did often use headsets, I would get a Bluetooth one.)
Yeah I don't think most phones have an FM antenna. All of the phones I've seen that expose FM radio end up using the headphones that are plugged in as the antenna. This means you have to use headphones, which is a bit of an annoyance when you want to stream music to a bluetooth speaker or even just use the phone's internal speaker.
You only have to have headphones plugged in. At least the Windows Phone radio app has software switch for where you want the audio output to go. You can plug in headphones and play on the speaker. If other radio apps don't have this, it would be easy to add.
Antennas, broadly, need to be some fraction of the wavelength of the wavelength you're trying to capture. Think resonance as to why this is the case.
Since FM operates around 100 MHz, cellular around 1GHz, and Wifi from 2-5GHz, you'd need a pretty "flexible" antenna to talk them all at once. To say nothing of the capacitive footwork you'd need to undertake to adjust the electrical length properly to tune the sucker.
Couple this with how FM Radio is seen as niche for smartphones and it makes sense to have an external antenna requirement.
There is no requirement for the radio app to output to the headphones that are being plugged in for antenna reasons. The built-in app for my BlackBerry Z30 has no problems reassigning output to a speaker.
But Jot Carpenter, vice president of government affairs for CTIA-The Wireless Association, resists the move to turn on the FM chip..."What Americans really want is the ability to stream, download and customize music playlists to meet their personal preferences," Carpenter said...
I wonder if the people whose job it is to make these sorts of patronizing arguments privately feel embarrassed when doing so.
I work at a telco that constantly makes ridiculous patronizing arguments.
The people making those statements are drinking so much kool-aid they honestly don't even know they're talking nonsense. They actually believe it to their core.
"The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible."
The funny part is when kool-aid drinking folks make dependent assertions. Then you have this whole series of partial or completely untrue assumptions. Sort of like "The Emperor's New Clothes."
I'm 32, pay $10/month for Spotify, and T-Mobile doesn't count music services towards my data cap. I haven't listened to the radio in my car in over a year.
Even if I'm an outlier, Spotify still has a free tier. Why would I go back to the radio? That would be like trading Netflix back in for Blockbuster Video. shudder
Probably the same. I'd just switch to their $50/line unlimited plan.
Strangely enough, I only have a problem with net neutrality violations when you're charging me extra for certain packets, not when you're giving me certain packets for free. Go figure.
Not all data is equal, spectrum is limited, and I'd rather users be permitted to get music bits that don't count towards their cap than some twit using spectrum for bittorrent. I would pay more because of T-Mobile's disregard for net neutrality in this case, because it benefits me as an end user. I've never seen Comcast, Verizon, or any other throttling of video content benefit someone (while at the same time they not being constrained by shared spectrum bandwidth limitations).
If there's money changing hands, it's bribery or extortion. If there's no money changing hands, it's still at least non-neutrality: the ISP is picking winners by determining which service providers get a competitive edge.
> That would be like trading Netflix back in for Blockbuster Video.
Not to be the "analogy not exactly right" guy, but it would be like closing Blockbuster Video just because "NETFLIX IS SO MUCH BETTER AND IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT THEN TOUGH SHIT".
I was so irritated that I sent a polite but snippy email to his lobbying agency, before deciding it would be more effective to repost it here (it was posted earlier today but largely ignored).
No, I don't think they feel embarrassed at all. This the human-level equivalent of promulgating botnets, and involves a similar principle - that if people are too passive to harden their systems against such obviously lame exploits, then they deserve whatever they get. I find this an obnoxious argument, which is why I have so little sympathy for the 'black hat hackers help people improve security' argument sometimes floated here on HN.
I actually think it's true that most people are ignorant or possibly even stupid, and that they won't adopt good security (or critical thinking) practices until they've learned the hard way - by being exploited for someone else's gain. But going from observing this fact to actively leveraging it is precisely the point at which one is making the world a worse place.
It seems silly to disable a perfectly good chip but to be fair, I only checked if my phone can receive FM radio after reading this post yet I have used AntennaPod, Spotify, and SoundCloud for hundreds of hours.
Motorola shines again btw. Not only do they not cripple their phones but also include a simple FM Radio app by default.
This is poor journalism, particularly coming from NPR.
The NAB (including NPR) are lobbying to force all phones to include an FM radio.
Since they can't say, "we want this to increase our ad revenue," they're using the tried and true, "it's a must for national security" approach. They've previously tried to get language added to Homeland Security bills that would force phone manufacturers to include radios.
Besides, forcing phone manufacturers to include a radio won't save the radio industry. Radio audiences are declining for the same reason broadcast TV audiences are: it's a one-size fits all product on a strict schedule that's overflowing with ads. It was in decline well before the smart phone.
That is the only reason I would use it. I attend Georgia Southern Football games and like to listen to the Radio Broadcast during the game. Streaming is normally well behind the game when it works. Most of the time there are to many people in the stadium and you can not get a reliable data connection.
There's a difference between including an FM radio and simply turning on a pre-existing one via a software update, which apparently is possible on at least some phone models.
And regardless of NPR's motives, their "it's needed for emergencies" argument is a pretty good one.
And selling hardware that's been crippled in some way always makes people uncomfortable. Whether it's an FM tuner being turned off, tethering being blocked, CPU features turned off, or whatever, manufacturing a working product and then selling it in a less-working state is worrisome and shouldn't be automatically considered acceptable. It's a strong indicator of a possible market failure and a sure sign that the consumer's ownership rights have been compromised.
In some jurisdictions you can sometimes root your phone, if someone has put the effort into defeating the technical obstacles put in place to enforce the crippling. Other phones include a tuner that is disabled through hardware means.
Just because the hardware is present doesn't mean it's easy to enable. Sure, the radio chip used in the iPhone may have an FM capability, but enabling it requires resources to write apps supporting it (you'd expect an FM-capable iPhone to have an FM app, right?), handle additional hardware considerations (FM that close to such a compact radio-noisy device may require nontrivial RF electronics & packaging changes), add an antenna (FM antennas are much longer than cellular ones, where to put it?), address convenience factors (using the headphones wire as an antenna only works insofar as there is a wired headphone attached, what about when it's not?), and generally adds complexity to a device that the designers didn't want that capability in to start with.
Instead of getting the FM receiver component enabled, you're more likely to have Apple et al tell & pay the radio chip makers to remove FM capability so they don't have to deal with some third party abusing the police power of the state to compel the manufacturers to make something do what they didn't want it to.
I'm not sure this is the reason at all. Talk of FM on iPhones goes back many years - even leading to rumours of iOS updates brining FM support, but they obviously never materialised. Nowadays I think the FM part is basically down to the chips themselves and the low-cost solution to have a generic chip that does all, instead of having a limited subset of functions based on each deal.
I used to work on combo bluetooth/fm/wifi chips that are used in cell phone applications. There is additional cost to make it work, both for bill of materials as well as recurring and non-recurring testing. So many customers preferred only to use the bluetooth/wifi portion of the chip. We even had a FM TX version in some chips.
What's the downside of turning this on? From the article it just seems like it would mean more capabilities, more consumer choice. Is the only "downside" that it allows you to bypass cell networks when getting content?
Running any circuits within the constrained space of a cellphone risks (i.e., definitely does) cause RF interference with the antenna(s) listening to cell towers , which is a huge engineering challenge.
It only works if there are headphones attached, which confuses users.
Plus, Google or another company has to pay an engineer to write an app for it, and test it against the hardware in the phones, etc. etc.
Usually this functionality is a byproduct of some random other chip on the phone that is multifunction, usually Bluetooth. So people who don't use Bluetooth get confused/upset/paranoid/tin foil hat when their FM Radio app tells them that Bluetooth needs to be enabled to use it.
Many users who really want FM can already do it today, but it involves rooting their phone and installing something like Cyanogenmod.
Maybe because the quality sucks? I mean, if you had TV on your phone but could only get 3 channels and they all had static, who would the customer blame that it doesn't work?
Am I going crazy? One day I woke up and could not find the Android app "FM Radio" (even had a shortcut on my home screen.) Looked and looked and looked and could not find it anywhere. Eventually I verified the apk was included in the original install.
Did my provider (Sprint?) or my manufacturer remove this during an update? Did Gooole remove this during an update?
Side note: anyone know of a good FM radio app on Android?
I would argue that analog FM radio has a pretty bad user experience, and I completely understand a manufacturer not including it because of that. The audio quality is usually poor, it's location and environment sensitive, and the system for distributing and the RDS text is slow to update, and often incomplete.
I generally agree with you that FM radio is not a very good user experience (except during emergencies, when it suddenly becomes incredibly useful). But that doesn't mean I get to tell other people whether they want it or not. Enabling the FM radio tuner chip doesn't have to affect the user experience at all for users who don't want to use it. The carrier doesn't have to include an FM radio app pre-installed. Users who want FM radio can install an app for it.
I would counter-argue that if there's an FM receiver in your phone, there's no reason you should be listening to analog FM radio. I can't imagine they wouldn't also support modern digital FM signals.
Pretty bad user experience was after Hurricane Sandy, when I was holed up in my office (evacuated from my home) with no electricity or Internet, but a fully charged phone that I couldn't use for anything but games, even though valuable information was being broadcast constantly on a frequency that my phone was perfectly capable of receiving.
My phone (Samsung Galaxy S3) has an FM radio. Unfortunately it's really difficult to use because it uses the headphones as the antenna, which means you have to literally stand in a certain way with your arms in a certain position to hear anything. But anyway, it has an FM radio ...
Its because they know that people can use FM for just about anything, and hooking an amateur FM Packet radio up isn't difficult, and you can have free ONE way transmissions.
Some use FM only, and have Packet Radios built into the phones.
While half-baked conspiracy theories are fun, a good journalist would've consulted a few more sources to get to the bottom of this story.
FM radio requires a large antenna. It will not work without one. The 5th generation iPod nano (2009) was the first iPod with an (enabled) FM radio. We used the headphone wire as the antenna. It worked well enough. While there was a tiny speaker in those iPods, headphones were the only practical way to listen to audio.
That's not the case with phones. People listen to the built-in speaker, and they listen over bluetooth and WiFi. It's becoming less and less common to plug headphones into these devices. That being the case, including an FM radio feature would just be a horrible experience for the majority of users: they'd hear nothing but static, all the time. I don't know about the other smartphone makers, but Apple will not ship something that will likely be a horrible experience for most users. Couple that with very low demand from users (as the article points out) and there's no FM radio on iPhones.
Anecdote of size one, but while I do use the headphone jack, Bluetooth is quickly taking over when it comes to listening to audio. Bluetooth head unit in my car, Bluetooth earbuds, Bluetooth mini-speaker, Bluetooth to my hifi rig...
I severely hope device ma ufacturers don't start not including headphone jacks, in favor of bluetooth connections. The only headphones I'd be able to use on those would be significantly more expensive, unless I just had a bluetooth audio receiver that had a 3.5mm hole, which I'd still have to charge or replace the batteries of
For iPod users, that is entirely reasonable (since they are basically required to have headphones handy to use the device at all), and that is exactly what we did.
For iPhone users, who never took their headphones out of the box, or lost them months ago, or simply left them at home today... it's less reasonable.
The fact is, most iPhone users don't have their headphones with them most of the time. That means the vast majority of launches of the Radio app would go straight to the "Please plug in your headphones" screen, at which point the user would be frustrated because they don't have headphones to plug in.
Whether it's worth it to include a feature that would result in frustration for many users, but yield utility for some users, is always a tough call. It's not black and white.
Maybe it's just the people I know, but I can't remember the last time someone played music from their phone without headphones. The only time I do it is by accident.
There's always one guy (and it's usually guy) who wants to share his tunes with everybody on the bus or subway. As for me, I do it when I'm at home all the time, when I'm doing chores or working from home.
As a point of reference, my Motorola smartphones all have an FM radio app that refuses to run if wired headphones are not connected- and if you ever disconnect them, the app stops playing music and throws an error. You can even listen over a bluetooth accessory- so long as you have headphones connected...
Because having to attach headphones only to not use them as headphones makes for a stupid-looking user experience. Most users don't comprehend "antennas", much less using headphone wires as such. Prompting for headphones but using the speaker would result in most users coiling up the headphone cable (in bewilderment) which pretty much defeats the point of having an antenna.
Never mind the fact that not all users would use headphones not suitable for use as an FM antenna (too long or short, wrong impedance matching, etc).
It wasn't their intention to be good journalists in this article.
> "But the mobile industry, which profits from selling data to smartphone users, says that with the consumer's move toward mobile streaming apps, the demand for radio simply isn't there."
They are positioning the mobile industry so they look as if they're trying to profit from denying users FM radio.
It's sad that a news agency that prides on being for the public and independent so easily turns to straight up propaganda when it's to push their own agenda.
"In contrast with commercial broadcasting, NPR's radio broadcasts do not carry traditional commercials, but has advertising in the form of brief statements from major sponsors which may include corporate slogans, descriptions of products and services, contact information such as website addresses and telephone numbers."
They have a revenue of about 180 million.
I don't actually think they're doing this for the money, they are a non-profit after all. I believe them when they just want the public to have access to FM radio. All the more reason for them not to engage in dirt writing like this.
I listen to the radio all the time on my $28 Nokia 105. It has a headphone detector, and won't launch the Radio App if it doesn't detect headphones. If a $28 phone 1/5th the size of the iPhone (with a 20x battery life) can play radio stations flawlessly, I can't think of very many reasons why a $900 iPhone can't do the same thing.
If you like half-baked conspiracy theories, what do you have to say about the removal of microSD cards from Android phones? I think that's far more damning.
I was on the same boat as you, and then I found out that these FM receivers are only disabled in the US. Seriously, the same models have perfectly enabled FM receivers in other countries.
When I open the FM radio app on my Z3, it goes "please plug in your headphones to listen to the radio, they act as a necessary antenna", and refuses to start otherwise, and that's that.
I have a Cat B15 phone, which runs Android, and it has an enabled FM radio. If I try to use it without headphones, I get a warning that without headphones as an antenna, reception will be poor. It sometimes works in good reception locations without an antenna, but it's a marginal FM radio. There's a "record FM radio" option.
"NPR, along with the NAB, has been part of a lobbying effort to require this free radio feature to be enabled."
I don't want an FM radio on my phone because the internet is a superior system 99% of the time. If Apple doesn't want to make an FM radio then they shouldn't have to. It should be the people creating technology who decide the features, not lobbyists using threats of force through government based on clearly biased political interests.
I'm very surprised that many seem to simply accept the rhetoric of this story and its talking points.
Exactly why are these chips being included and disabled, as opposed to not including them in the first place? No one seems to be questioning this part.
Can anyone shed light on this? What is the back story here?
AM broadcast requires a relatively larger antenna larger antenna to receive. Though, most of portable AM radios use a bar shaped antenna inside. There are several problems with it.
1) You will have to integrate that antenna somewhere in the device, and you can't really make it "smaller" than a certain size.
2) Even if you could integrate the antenna, it is directional; with a use case for mobile devices, unless you are getting an exceptionally strong signal, you'll get varying results out of it.
The headphone wire isn't enough? The cheapo AM portables everybody has been plopping down next to the beer bucket since the 70s never seemed to have an antenna longer than 2.5 ft. I understand the wavelength is longer and the power is lower.
Those whip antennas are for FM broadcast. For the AM broadcast, the bar antenna has a coil of wire wrapped around an iron bar to compensate for requirement of a longer antenna to receive AM broadcast. It'd be actually size prohibitive to make an antenna like FM radio, but designed for AM.
> "NPR, along with the NAB, has been part of a lobbying effort to require this free radio feature to be enabled"
Do we really need a law for this? If people wanted it they would just demand it from manufacturers and/or carriers
> "Smulyan's lobbying has prompted the Indiana Senate to urge mobile carriers to activate the FM chip."
Total newspeak. Government bodies don't "urge", they force.
> "When the power grid is out, the only lifeline for the American public is having an FM tuner"
If you can't afford a battery powered radio, you can't afford a cell phone. And BTW if the FM tuner is your "only lifeline", you might want to reevaluate your preparedness for anything serious at all.
> "Every time you buy a phone, you've paid for that radio," Smulyan says.
Probably not true. In all likelihood the cost of the chip has no bearing on the cost of your device, and even if it did it would probably cost more to design separate chips (one with and one with the tuner) for separate markets, and that cost would get passed on to consumers
> "What Americans really want is the ability to stream, download and customize music playlists to meet their personal preferences," Carpenter said, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, "and that's not what the traditional FM radio offers."
What an arrogant asshole. His condescending presumptuous attitude aside, neither of these options precludes the other and what consumers probably want is every option at their disposal.
111 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 357 ms ] threadIt seems like they're citing manufacturers as well as carriers. Since many major carriers order variants of phone models specific to their network, it's not out of the question that either could be responsible for the lockout, even if it is at the hardware level.
I seem to remember that my old pre-MP3 devices used the headphone cable as the antenna. Would it be easy to have good reception in a smartphone without using a headphone cable?
Given how I use my smartphone using Bluetooth speakers for music and seldom headphones, I doubt that the FM chip would work for me. (And if I did often use headsets, I would get a Bluetooth one.)
I guess, they could have the FM app tell people that they need to plug in the correct type of headphone for this feature.
Since FM operates around 100 MHz, cellular around 1GHz, and Wifi from 2-5GHz, you'd need a pretty "flexible" antenna to talk them all at once. To say nothing of the capacitive footwork you'd need to undertake to adjust the electrical length properly to tune the sucker.
Couple this with how FM Radio is seen as niche for smartphones and it makes sense to have an external antenna requirement.
There is no requirement for the radio app to output to the headphones that are being plugged in for antenna reasons. The built-in app for my BlackBerry Z30 has no problems reassigning output to a speaker.
I wonder if the people whose job it is to make these sorts of patronizing arguments privately feel embarrassed when doing so.
The people making those statements are drinking so much kool-aid they honestly don't even know they're talking nonsense. They actually believe it to their core.
Even if I'm an outlier, Spotify still has a free tier. Why would I go back to the radio? That would be like trading Netflix back in for Blockbuster Video. shudder
Strangely enough, I only have a problem with net neutrality violations when you're charging me extra for certain packets, not when you're giving me certain packets for free. Go figure.
Not all data is equal, spectrum is limited, and I'd rather users be permitted to get music bits that don't count towards their cap than some twit using spectrum for bittorrent. I would pay more because of T-Mobile's disregard for net neutrality in this case, because it benefits me as an end user. I've never seen Comcast, Verizon, or any other throttling of video content benefit someone (while at the same time they not being constrained by shared spectrum bandwidth limitations).
I don't know if that is the case or not in this situation, but it could be. Not everything becomes a violation
Not to be the "analogy not exactly right" guy, but it would be like closing Blockbuster Video just because "NETFLIX IS SO MUCH BETTER AND IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT THEN TOUGH SHIT".
No, I don't think they feel embarrassed at all. This the human-level equivalent of promulgating botnets, and involves a similar principle - that if people are too passive to harden their systems against such obviously lame exploits, then they deserve whatever they get. I find this an obnoxious argument, which is why I have so little sympathy for the 'black hat hackers help people improve security' argument sometimes floated here on HN.
I actually think it's true that most people are ignorant or possibly even stupid, and that they won't adopt good security (or critical thinking) practices until they've learned the hard way - by being exploited for someone else's gain. But going from observing this fact to actively leveraging it is precisely the point at which one is making the world a worse place.
/GRAR
It's about the same as a politician talking about proposed legislation with the phrase common sense.
The goal here is to paint people who oppose your view as out of touch with the average American or acting nonsensically.
Motorola shines again btw. Not only do they not cripple their phones but also include a simple FM Radio app by default.
The NAB (including NPR) are lobbying to force all phones to include an FM radio.
Since they can't say, "we want this to increase our ad revenue," they're using the tried and true, "it's a must for national security" approach. They've previously tried to get language added to Homeland Security bills that would force phone manufacturers to include radios.
Besides, forcing phone manufacturers to include a radio won't save the radio industry. Radio audiences are declining for the same reason broadcast TV audiences are: it's a one-size fits all product on a strict schedule that's overflowing with ads. It was in decline well before the smart phone.
https://recodetech.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/arbitron-1980...
And regardless of NPR's motives, their "it's needed for emergencies" argument is a pretty good one.
Instead of getting the FM receiver component enabled, you're more likely to have Apple et al tell & pay the radio chip makers to remove FM capability so they don't have to deal with some third party abusing the police power of the state to compel the manufacturers to make something do what they didn't want it to.
You'll listen to the radio ads instead of the streaming services' ads; mobile carriers may have special ad-revenue arrangements with such services.
Plus, Google or another company has to pay an engineer to write an app for it, and test it against the hardware in the phones, etc. etc.
Usually this functionality is a byproduct of some random other chip on the phone that is multifunction, usually Bluetooth. So people who don't use Bluetooth get confused/upset/paranoid/tin foil hat when their FM Radio app tells them that Bluetooth needs to be enabled to use it.
Many users who really want FM can already do it today, but it involves rooting their phone and installing something like Cyanogenmod.
So users are why we can't have nice things.
Also, on Nokia N900 they simply didn't do an app at all. Lots of them were quickly written by community and everyone was happy.
Did my provider (Sprint?) or my manufacturer remove this during an update? Did Gooole remove this during an update?
Side note: anyone know of a good FM radio app on Android?
FM radio requires a large antenna. It will not work without one. The 5th generation iPod nano (2009) was the first iPod with an (enabled) FM radio. We used the headphone wire as the antenna. It worked well enough. While there was a tiny speaker in those iPods, headphones were the only practical way to listen to audio.
That's not the case with phones. People listen to the built-in speaker, and they listen over bluetooth and WiFi. It's becoming less and less common to plug headphones into these devices. That being the case, including an FM radio feature would just be a horrible experience for the majority of users: they'd hear nothing but static, all the time. I don't know about the other smartphone makers, but Apple will not ship something that will likely be a horrible experience for most users. Couple that with very low demand from users (as the article points out) and there's no FM radio on iPhones.
[citation needed]
All the smartphones I'm aware of on the market still include a headphone jack.
Hell, the new Macbook with the USB-C connector has two plugs. A USB-C connector, and an audio jack.
For iPhone users, who never took their headphones out of the box, or lost them months ago, or simply left them at home today... it's less reasonable.
The fact is, most iPhone users don't have their headphones with them most of the time. That means the vast majority of launches of the Radio app would go straight to the "Please plug in your headphones" screen, at which point the user would be frustrated because they don't have headphones to plug in.
Whether it's worth it to include a feature that would result in frustration for many users, but yield utility for some users, is always a tough call. It's not black and white.
What mental magic are people doing to conclude that this is a bad idea? Is it because the Apple guy said something against it? Christ.
http://i.imgur.com/TMCyQwI.png
Never mind the fact that not all users would use headphones not suitable for use as an FM antenna (too long or short, wrong impedance matching, etc).
Most other people out side US understand "antennas" just fine.
> "But the mobile industry, which profits from selling data to smartphone users, says that with the consumer's move toward mobile streaming apps, the demand for radio simply isn't there."
They are positioning the mobile industry so they look as if they're trying to profit from denying users FM radio.
It's sad that a news agency that prides on being for the public and independent so easily turns to straight up propaganda when it's to push their own agenda.
"In contrast with commercial broadcasting, NPR's radio broadcasts do not carry traditional commercials, but has advertising in the form of brief statements from major sponsors which may include corporate slogans, descriptions of products and services, contact information such as website addresses and telephone numbers."
They have a revenue of about 180 million.
I don't actually think they're doing this for the money, they are a non-profit after all. I believe them when they just want the public to have access to FM radio. All the more reason for them not to engage in dirt writing like this.
No other reasons required.
You must be kidding me.
I was on the same boat as you, and then I found out that these FM receivers are only disabled in the US. Seriously, the same models have perfectly enabled FM receivers in other countries.
When I open the FM radio app on my Z3, it goes "please plug in your headphones to listen to the radio, they act as a necessary antenna", and refuses to start otherwise, and that's that.
I don't want an FM radio on my phone because the internet is a superior system 99% of the time. If Apple doesn't want to make an FM radio then they shouldn't have to. It should be the people creating technology who decide the features, not lobbyists using threats of force through government based on clearly biased political interests.
Exactly why are these chips being included and disabled, as opposed to not including them in the first place? No one seems to be questioning this part.
Can anyone shed light on this? What is the back story here?
Fun fact: at least for small orders you can get PICs cheaper than 555s.
There is a lot of stuff that people want to hear that only comes over AM, like baseball games, for example.
1) You will have to integrate that antenna somewhere in the device, and you can't really make it "smaller" than a certain size. 2) Even if you could integrate the antenna, it is directional; with a use case for mobile devices, unless you are getting an exceptionally strong signal, you'll get varying results out of it.
Do we really need a law for this? If people wanted it they would just demand it from manufacturers and/or carriers
> "Smulyan's lobbying has prompted the Indiana Senate to urge mobile carriers to activate the FM chip."
Total newspeak. Government bodies don't "urge", they force.
> "When the power grid is out, the only lifeline for the American public is having an FM tuner"
If you can't afford a battery powered radio, you can't afford a cell phone. And BTW if the FM tuner is your "only lifeline", you might want to reevaluate your preparedness for anything serious at all.
> "Every time you buy a phone, you've paid for that radio," Smulyan says.
Probably not true. In all likelihood the cost of the chip has no bearing on the cost of your device, and even if it did it would probably cost more to design separate chips (one with and one with the tuner) for separate markets, and that cost would get passed on to consumers
> "What Americans really want is the ability to stream, download and customize music playlists to meet their personal preferences," Carpenter said, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, "and that's not what the traditional FM radio offers."
What an arrogant asshole. His condescending presumptuous attitude aside, neither of these options precludes the other and what consumers probably want is every option at their disposal.