Chance Miller, writing for 9to5Mac:
A new report from CBC News details the progress being made to unlock the FM radio chip that many smartphones feature. Many smartphones have an untapped FM chip inside them that users are unable to take advantage of and while many Android devices are confirmed to have the chip, the iPhone also has despite Apple not officially recognizing it.
This is fascinating. I’d love a built-in FM radio in my iPhone. It’s not a critical feature, purely a nice-to-have. But flipping things around, I can’t imagine Apple or Google feeling great about exposing an FM radio as part of their device feature list. After all, bad reception would be seen by many as a flaw in the phone, and FM radio would be free content that would compete with paid offerings like Apple Music.
That said, I expect that if one side adopts and promotes FM, it’ll spread by necessity.
I’ve often wondered about this. The biggest is question is why Apple and Google happen to be in agreement on this, even if tacitly. You’d think at least one Android smartphone OEM would have enabled this feature as a competitive advantage. Could it be that carriers explicitly forbid this in order to force people to consume their data plan?
FM reception isn’t a problem on the iPod Nano because the earbud serve as an antenna.
I am using it every day and it work perfectly !
Why would Apple include an FM chip in the iPhone that they don’t use? Doesn’t seem very Apple-like. That said, I’d love it if I could have actual FM radio on my iPhone and use it like I did on my iPod Nano. The FM “app” on the Nano was superior to any Internet radio app available for the iPhone.
One problem:
Apple Music.
nuff said.
The chip probably does more than just FM and they use it for the other functions. FM is just a feature of the chip that is disabled for whatever reason.
I’m guessing that if an iPhone were also an FM radio it would classify the iPhone as a different device with different rules.
One other problem:
Crappy music on FM radio along with way too many ads and DJ yabber.
nuff said.
I’d like to see FM made available. I’d never use it to listen to the radio over streaming music as I already do, but I think it could be a good emergency feature in cases where Internet infrastructure has been knocked out etc. Earthquakes, hurricanes, zombies etc…
They could always enable it and open an API, but not make a first party app, then users would blame the third party apps for it!
When they announce FM support, the could also announce AOL integration, and a phone case that includes cassette tapes.
I’d be willing to bet that a large fraction of the core demographics of Apple products give about as much consideration of FM offerings as they do engine noise. Best case is that it’s a torture device used by parents, listening to classic rock, to teach their children about ‘real music’. Any flirting with the FM channel on the car radio is only because it comes before Aux and Bluetooth in the selections.
A lot of people seem to be under the impression that this would just require flipping some sort of software switch, but enabling the FM functionality would require extra hardware circuitry (most phones that enable the FM radio have extra circuitry connecting the SoC’s FM radio to the headphone jack to use the headphone cable as an antenna).
Most SoCs also have support for things like VGA video and optical audio out but unless extra circuitry and ports are added to the device those parts of the SoC just sit unused, like the FM radio.
I’d be happy if all the chip could receive was WKCR, WBGO, WFMU, and WSOU. Only one of those is a commercial station, I believe.
I’d be especially happy if that capability meant less data usage.
Well, that and you’d need to hook up an antenna, and do more testing, all for something that doesn’t sell phones and basically nobody cares about.