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The removal of FM radio from cell phones was a big mistake. It should never have allowed. Radio is very useful in emergencies. Lately I have been getting back
by waveforms 2mo ago
The removal of FM radio from cell phones was a big mistake. It should never have allowed. Radio is very useful in emergencies.
Lately I have been getting back in to internet radio, mostly via Elisa in KDE. Here is my favorite internet stream: https://hawaiireggaenetwork.com/ https://hawaiireggaenetwork.com/
- JuniperMesos 2mo agoI don't think I ever used the FM feature on my phone, except purely to test out whether it worked. I wouldn't make phone purchasing decisions based on whether or not it had a FM radio. A regulation requiring it in the ostensible name of safety would make phones somewhat more expensive and I'm skeptical that it would even help improve safety in an emergency significantly.
- mixmastamyk 2mo agoHow much would an additional frequency cost to add to a sophisticated radio?
- JuniperMesos 2mo agoI think this is a complex electronics engineering question that the people working at smartphone manufacturers probably looked at in depth when they decided whether or not they would lose money for getting rid of the feature.
- mixmastamyk 2mo agoThought it was that executives decided that forcing you into the media store was much more lucrative.
- palmotea 2mo ago> I think this is a complex electronics engineering question that the people working at smartphone manufacturers probably looked at in depth when they decided whether or not they would lose money for getting rid of the feature. Ha!
- mp107 2mo agoMost smartphones do include most of the FM radio circuitry in the chip used also for Bluetooth connectivity for example. It's just a choice of the manufacturer to do not implement it completely, sometimes in hardware, sometimes in software. Several years ago there was SpiritFM application for Android that allowed to use FM radio on smartphones that sometimes never supported FM radio... oficially. So the only missing piece is sometimes only the software. As a result I think it wouldn't cost somewhat noticeably more to have that feature.
- SV_BubbleTime 2mo ago>Most smartphones do include most of the FM radio circuitry in the chip used also for Bluetooth connectivity for example Who told you this? They are wildly different frequencies and encoding.
- jeffbee 2mo agoTwenty years ago this would have been wrong with a kernel of truth. Today, it's just wrong. There were chips that integrated all this but they weren't that popular in the West and ultimately nobody cared. https://www.mediatek.com/press-room/mediatek-announces-worlds-smallest-4-in-1-combo-chip-wi-fi-bluetooth-gps-fm-solution https://www.mediatek.com/press-room/mediatek-announces-world...
- userbinator 2mo agoMTK still has the largest marketshare of smartphone SoCs worldwide and they still use their combo RFICs. https://pccentral.net/q1-2026-smartphone-soc-market-share-mediatek-leads/ https://pccentral.net/q1-2026-smartphone-soc-market-share-me... https://www.androidheadlines.com/2025/03/mediatek-leads-global-smartphone-soc-market-as-samsung-slips-again.html https://www.androidheadlines.com/2025/03/mediatek-leads-glob...
- numpad0 2mo agoAnd it's not a tiny kernel of truth, even iPhone(2007) had Wi-Fi/BT combo chips with FM radio. Apple was partly responsible for death of FM radio, by not implementing the software feature. That's also literally 20 years ago.
- userbinator 2mo agowould make phones somewhat more expensive "somewhat" as in the ballpark of a few cents, definitely less than $1, because it's already there in the reference designs and deliberately removing it would actually take extra work and cost far more. I remember all the no-name/generic MP3/MP4 players had an FM radio, while Apple's iPods did not. They deliberately chose not to include one, and definitely not because of cost.
- Marsymars 2mo ago> I don't think I ever used the FM feature on my phone One killer feature for phone-sized portable FM radios is live sports! Some sports that have TV broadcasts but no radio broadcast will pipe the broadcast audio over an FM channel within the stadium. Of course for sports that have a radio broadcast, you can tune directly to it. Depending on the sport, it's really nice to get player background info, or some sports have mics on players that get piped through the radio in your ear.
- jraph 2mo agoI suppose Auracast could be used for that, which is a broadcast audio feature of Bluetooth Low Energy [1]. My Bluetooth pods have it. I'm not sure how well it's supported, I don't think I've ever entered a place that uses it (or I didn't notice), so I could never try it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auracast?oldid=1346244865 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auracast?oldid=1346244865
- JuniperMesos 2mo agoI have never had any interest in live sports and I was genuinely unaware of this use case.
- m463 2mo agoI have a car with it - even HD - and I thought I would use it more. But every time I try it out, the stations are playing a loud advertisement.
- user2722 2mo agoAgree. The only problem about radio is requiring wired headphones to serve as antenna. Do flagship Snapdragon SOCs still have radio? Thinking about next GOS compatible Motorola-branded device, the first device GOS will support with Snapdragon.
- kanbankaren 2mo agoMy current Android phone has a FM radio that doesn't even require a wired headphone as the FM antenna is built-in. If you connect your BT headset, the FM station is heard through the BT headset in full stereo. Of course, it is a Chinese brand who haven't forsaken FM radios. Apparently, Europeans still prefer a FM radio on their smartphones that Chinese brands that sell in Europe still retain them. Here in USA, people don't seem to care about radio.
- ACCount37 2mo agoSoCs - not really. FM radio support is a part of a Bluetooth chip, an audio codec chip, or even a standalone IC. In modern high end SoCs, even the 5G modem is largely evicted from the SoC itself. Only the digital processing happens in the SoC - while ADC/DAC and anything analog lives in its own IC.
- inigyou 2mo agoIf you mandate FM for this reason what else will you mandate? Morse code scanning for SOS? Cellphones got cellphone emergency broadcasts before they lost FM radio, so they still show emergency broadcasts.
- unixhero 2mo agoFM is a technology that was a solved problem. It didn't have to go.
- kanbankaren 2mo agoWhat a ridiculous comment! Cellphone emergency broadcasts turned out to be not reliable during the Hawaiian Island fires. RDS in FM has a special mode for emergency broadcasts and some countries use them. As FM signals easily cover a 50-75 mile radius, the coverage area is huge versus cellular emergency broadcasts requiring the towers to be powered on which have also failed during natural disasters.
- addaon 2mo agoI assume they'd also mandate headphone ports, since without a wired headphone to use as an antenna I don't know how you'd do cheap FM in a cell phone. Which, if the motivation is to provide emergency notification, I also assume means mandating that users carry wired headphones? Sliding down this slope looks fun...
- lesostep 2mo agoIf I remember correctly, wasn't that because you can't fit proper antenna into the phone? Something-something antenna 1/4 of the wavelength physics. And FM wave is roughly 3 meters long. When people carried antennas (headphone cords) around it was handy, but not a lot of people would carry antenna now