I didn’t even realize Qualcomm removed the built in FM radio from their chips. Huh.

  • @[email protected]
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    841 year ago

    i hate how every quality of life feature now has to be pitched as essential safety, instead of simply being there because it’s good. can’t have quality anymore unless it’s literally necessary

    • @[email protected]
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      411 year ago

      Meh, I haven’t listened to FM in years. It’s just not a feature as far as I’m concerned.

      • smallaubergine
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        351 year ago

        I know I’m a minority opinion but I like having the option. It’s like IR blasters, SD cards, removable batteries… things I didn’t use all the time but sometimes come very much in handy.

        • @[email protected]
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          201 year ago

          Return of the IR blaster would be absolutely killer for me. I LOVED that feature on my old Samsungs, especially because my SO has a tendency to just… leave the remote places

          • andrew_bidlaw
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            141 year ago

            They are still there in some chinese brand phones. I’m not sure it’s mentioned anywhere on the box tho.

        • u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)
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          71 year ago

          SD Card is pretty much a necessity for me. I really wish the 1TB cards were more affordable. And when I had a phone with removable battery, I used that too. Instead of a power bank, I had 2 batteries. Instant recharge basically.

        • Amju Wolf
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          1 year ago

          The problem is that you have to make the line somewhere. Sure, one small feature is kinda miniscule, but you could easily name dozens, and that starts eating into costs and/or other actually useful features fast.

          There’s also the fact that when you have a “swiss army knife” of phones chances are it doesn’t do anything really well.

      • @[email protected]
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        1 year ago

        FM is good in theory, but I stopped listening over a decade ago due to the sheer overwhelming advertising. Sometimes it felt like I’d go half an hour or more without any music to listen to. It’s just not worth it

  • Zellith
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    621 year ago

    Maybe the 3.5mm jack and headphones could double as an antenna!

    • @[email protected]
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      41 year ago

      The Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Lite does that. If I’m not mistaken, some budget phones nowadays still do that.

      Even if they don’t, as long as there’s a headphone jack, it might be possible to add good FM Radio support with NextRadio/Spirit2. You might need to root your phone, though.

    • Addv4
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      -11 year ago

      There were a few Motorola smartphones that did that actually. It worked quite well tbh.

      • Redeven
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        261 year ago

        All phones I’ve ever owned did that. The radio app would tell you to plug your earphones.

      • @[email protected]
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        11 year ago

        There still are. I bought mine a year and a couple of months ago and it has FM radio and a 3.5 mm jack. And it’s a great phone.

  • Carighan Maconar
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    441 year ago

    Analogue radio is getting shut down in favor of digital broadcasts, so I doubt this would truly be helpful in many areas.

    • Margot RobbieOPM
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      151 year ago

      Aren’t digital radio less reliable than analog FM broadcasts? Would digital broadcasts be as useful during an emergency?

      I don’t really know that much about the subject, so I’d like to learn a bit more.

      • @[email protected]
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        241 year ago

        It’s not necessarily clear cut for one being more reliable than the other. FM broadcasts are analog and more likely to be subject to interference (interference will directly impact what you hear, but not as badly as with AM radio) and as the signal falls off it will be harder to hear. Digital radio will be perfectly clear as long as you get a signal, but may become distorted or just cut out if the signal is weak and there are too many errors in the data being received. There will be error correction for digital radio signals, but eventually you won’t be able to receive reliably enough that it will fail. If I had to guess, assuming all of the equipment is working, digital is probably going to be more reliable than analog radio in more conditions and over a longer distance, and it probably needs less bandwidth in general because you could compress the stream.

        • u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)
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          1 year ago

          I’d argue it is still less reliable since the channels are multiplexed. This means a failure of single transmitter takes down all of those channels at once. Secondly, digital radio often uses SFN to save bandwidth and power. This however means that a single misconfigured/malfunctioning transmitter can cause destructive interference in a wider area.

          This is happening in my area for a few months now. A new low power DAB+ transmitter was added into the network. I was able to get a poor but still usable signal before, while now the signal is strong, there’s too much interference for the error correction to compensate. Someone on a forum from this area has mentioned the same happening to him after the addition of this transmitter, when trying to tune DAB+ in his car.

          But sure, if the technology works, it can be better.

          • @[email protected]
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            21 year ago

            For sure! There’s definitely going to be problems with digital radio when it’s used to cram more channels on the same frequency band or whatever. But the particular implementation of broadcast digital radio aside, if we’re just talking modulation, I would bet on digital modes being able to transmit further more reliably than any analog FM signal.

            I know that some of the digital modes like FT8 that hams use can be super effective at making long distance contacts in low noise environments. Of course these are text modes, and not used for voice. I’m not sure whether or not something like FT8 will do better than regular CW in the same conditions, but I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if it could… Being able to do error correction for signals would likely make a huge difference in noisy environments.

      • @[email protected]
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        131 year ago

        In a life or death situation it would be easier to construct an FM transmitter/receiver than a digital counterpart.

        • @[email protected]
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          271 year ago

          AM transmitters / receivers are far easier to construct than FM ones, though. If I was in an emergency situation where I couldn’t communicate with anybody I think I might be able to at least make an AM receiver, even if there aren’t very many components around… But I would need a reference to have any clue how to approach an FM one, and you’d definitely need more components available. Frequency modulation is quite a bit more complicated. If you want to transmit, CW is probably your best hope?

          Realistically, though, almost anybody in an emergency situation is doomed if the only thing that would save them is building any kind of radio. It’s not a skill set that most people have… Which I guess is why you might advocate for everybody’s phones to be able to act as FM receivers in case that’s the best way to get an emergency broadcast, because then they would have a device that’s capable of it on hand. You’re probably better off if you have a dedicated emergency radio, especially if you might lose power for an extended period of time, though.

          • Amju Wolf
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            21 year ago

            Best part about a simple AM receiver is that it doesn’t need a battery… For emergency situations it’d definitely be best as it’s dead simple to construct, you can boost gain in radio station for more reach / power to the battery-less receivers, etc. and the transmitters are simple, too.

            For emergencies it’s also not a bad idea to have an offline copy of Wikipedia.

  • @[email protected]
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    321 year ago

    Phones should have FM radio not as an emergency feature, but as a method of banging out the tunes. I wanna jam out at a campsite with no downloaded music and no cell service.

    • smallaubergine
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      341 year ago

      That’s because the FM signal needs an antenna that’s longer than you can fit in your phone

      • @[email protected]
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        121 year ago

        Good luck bringing it back when the whole industry moves away from wired headphones and 3.5mm jacks.

      • darcy
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        81 year ago

        THATS WHY? i was always confused why that was the case. i thought it was a ““feature”” to only enable fm for headphones. my old phone also only allowed the eq to be used with a speaker other than the internal one

      • @[email protected]
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        41 year ago

        Nokia 105 (2023) has a radio that works without headphones so this is not necessarily true.

        • @[email protected]
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          51 year ago

          I had an old Moto phone with an FM radio that worked without headphones, although it was stated that with headphones plugged in reception would be much better (which was true). My current phone (a Moto one too) has FM radio, and I use it.

          I never had a phone without FM radio. It’s one of the features I actually want in my phone.

        • @[email protected]
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          31 year ago

          The redmi 7a smartphone I had also supported wireless FM radio without plugging in a headphone jack.

      • @[email protected]
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        151 year ago

        Best we can do is a fancy pen for all that art that people do on their phones all the time

    • aard
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      51 year ago

      Is this the latest “sneaky” way to insist all phones need headphone jacks?

      My current phone has an FM radio, and no headphone jack. It uses the headphones as antenna via the USB-C adapter.

      Never used it, though - and rarely used radio in any phone which had that feature before that.

    • @[email protected]
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      31 year ago

      Actually many modern electric cars are trying to get rid of FM radios because the electric motors can cause all sorts of interference (or so they say)

      • @[email protected]
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        91 year ago

        IIRC that’s just an issue with AM radios. And it happens with petrol cars too. A friend of mine’s car has this weird quirk where, while running below 50km/h, (I assume) the alternator generates RF interference in the AM band.

        We have nothing broadcasting there though, so no biggie.

      • @[email protected]
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        1 year ago

        That’s bullshit.

        Ride around in a golf cart listening to the radio sometime. It works fine.

        Part of the reason the manufacturers want to get rid of the radios is because they make the entertainment center style consoles that all cars have now much more expensive.

        For most people, the best radio they own is the one in their car. Radios near interference sources like rotating iron parts need to be well shielded and a lot of the design techniques that will accommodate high selectivity and sensitivity are shared with interference tolerance.

        So even the shittiest car had to have a decent radio.

        Nowadays the shittiest car could have a godawful quality infotainment system if it weren’t for the damn radio that buyers expect. And it’s not like the manufacturers can just slap down a trash radio into the infotainment system, it would require shielding, separation and a host of other components and techniques that are just left off crappier digital electronics all together.

        Since so many other countries have sunset analog fm, theres readily available cheap shitty infotainment systems for use in the rios and versas that make up the majority of car sales in the us and have razor thin profit margins.

        So… no, the electric motors aren’t keeping them from putting a radio in electric cars.

        E: but if you don’t wanna believe gayhitler420s rant about radio, plenty of electric cars have am/fm radios in em, including the Toyota bz4x.

    • @[email protected]
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      11 year ago

      Right now the iPhone can straight up connect to the Iridium Satellite network, which IMO is far more useful that FM radio in any emergency. At least that system can send and receive messages, including most importantly GPS Co-ordinates.

  • @[email protected]
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    131 year ago

    While not a physical radio, a Linux phone such as the Librem 5 in conjunction with an RTL-SDR dongle and external antenna may be a good candidate for a mobile software-defined radio (SDR) transceiver.

    SDR frameworks such as GNUradio or REDHAWK are well-established by this point. Newer versions of REDHAWK are designed to run on CentOS/Rocky Linux, however, and they don’t (AFAIK) come with a mobile-friendly UI.

    I do know that there are some web-based SDR tools in the wild. I’m not very familiar with them, their system requirements/capabilities/limitations, but they could be worth a look to jump-start a Progressive Web App for mobile devices.

    • TWeaK
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      31 year ago

      I also remember some guy at a think tank in the US that covers cyberwarfare saying that one of the surprises was that Russia didn’t try to disable Ukraine’s cell network, either via cyberwarfare or via conventional means; taking out the cell network would do a lot to dick up a country.

      Russia didn’t disable the cell network because they were using cell phones to coordinate their forces (as presumably they didn’t have proper radios).

      • @[email protected]
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        1 year ago

        Yeah. It’s not like Russia isn’t into dicking up Ukraine.

        Russia doesn’t want ukraine or its people: Russia just wants what it probably calls ‘western Russian’ Farmland; and some poor people to work it.

    • JokeDeity
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      21 year ago

      I saw a YouTube video where someone was testing crank powered phone chargers and they weren’t able to get enough juice to ever power the phones. Have you tested it for that purpose?

        • JokeDeity
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          31 year ago

          With respect, I’d like to double down on my question and ask if you personally have used it to charge your phone and how well it worked.

            • JokeDeity
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              31 year ago

              I would be legitimately interested in a demonstratably good crank charger, but it seems like there’s a million bad ones out there, that’s why I ask.

              • @[email protected]
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                41 year ago

                When you see how little energy a Tour d’France cyclist can generate, with their legs, over a given period of time, it becomes clear why these crank things are useless.

                You could possibly charge a phone with a cycling setup, I haven’t done the math in a while. What I recall is the human body makes for a terrible generator.

                • Amju Wolf
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                  11 year ago

                  Humans are efficient, and there are also huge losses in converting the energy from work to electricity, and then further converting this to whatever voltage you actually need, while also likely first charging a battery somewhere so you can use it at a different time than you are cranking/pedaling…

                  However humans are also strong and can think of mechanisms that help with leverage and whatnot; for example an elliptical machine would probably be better than a bike.

                  With that being said the power you can generate is still pretty small; around 100Wh is floating around. If you worked out more you’d make more, obviously, but that might not be feasible.

                  It’d still be more than enough for essentials like charging your phone though.

            • TWeaK
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              11 year ago

              You keep it in your car, I’m sure your car can charge your phone.

      • @[email protected]
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        21 year ago

        Arent you supposed to crank charge a battery for a while, and then charge the phone or other device via the battery? Or do you mean they couldnt meaningfully charge the battery at all

        • JokeDeity
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          31 year ago

          The ladder, they weren’t able to get anything meaningful from a pretty great deal of effort into cranking it.

          • Kernal64
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            51 year ago

            That’s what you get when trying to charge a phone with a ladder!

    • @[email protected]
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      21 year ago

      I got one after the crazy storms we had over the summer. Had an old cube Nola radio that ran on a 9volt we had growing up but that has long since been lost

  • mtdyson_01
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    101 year ago

    They would have to put the headphone jacks back in since the wires were the antenna

  • TWeaK
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    1 year ago

    There’s another type of radio that could save lives if implemented in smartphones. In the United States, the NOAA runs a network of radio towers that broadcast up-to-the-minute weather reports and automated alerts, which are specifically designed to stay running during tornadoes and other emergencies. The signals are broadcasted on 162.400 – 162.550 MHz, above the FM band, allowing the signals to travel much farther than regular radio or cell networks.

    Higher frequencies travel shorter distances and permeate through buildings and trees less, so 162.4 - 162.55 MHz is going to be worse than the rest of the FM band (but still better than cell frequencies).

    • Virtual Insanity
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      51 year ago

      It’s not that straight forward. And in a practical sense 162MHz is hardly significantly higher than 100MHz.

      • TWeaK
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        51 year ago

        Apologies, I accidentally missed off the end of the quote, the bit I was commenting on:

        The signals are broadcasted on 162.400 – 162.550 MHz, above the FM band, allowing the signals to travel much farther than regular radio or cell networks.

        I agree that it isn’t much different. However it is objectively worse than regular FM radio, not better as the article claimed.

        • Virtual Insanity
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          21 year ago

          I still disagree. There are far more significant factors than the frequency.

          Longer wavelength isn’t an instant blanket solution to better propogation.

          Factors like typical transmitter and receiver configurations matter, location matters, object density matters, reflections etc… etc…

          Hence why UHF is preferred in some cases by emergency services and so on.

          Ultimately anything above 60MHz is going to be line of sight or a reflection when assuming the receiving station is mobile or portable, and in that case if the user is indoors higher frequencies might reflect better.

          Also narrow FM has more power density than wide FM for the same power level, hence why broadcast transmitters need to be so incredibly powerful to get anywhere.

  • SargTeaPot
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    81 year ago

    … my last phone had fm radio that didn’t need headphones to work or even internet. My new phone needs headphones to work… why are y’all buying expensive phones with no features!!!

    • Dave.
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      61 year ago

      No headphone socket on all the cool phones now, remember?

      So now the manufacturer needs to squeeze a FM antenna into the phone and they juuuust used “lack of space” as the bullshit excuse for removing the headphone socket on this new model so they’d much prefer to pretend that FM radio didn’t exist thanks.

      • SargTeaPot
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        1 year ago

        Except for the 2 phones I’ve listed. Both have a headphone jack and the unihertz tank 2 has a working projector.

        Edit Last phone was ulefone power armour 13 My current phone is the unihertz 8898 tank 2

        • Dave.
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          11 year ago

          I have a Samsung A71, one of the reasons I chose it was because it had a headphone socket. It’s not a “cool” phone but it’s very practical, and it wasn’t outrageously expensive.

          I have had a very nice pair of corded noise cancelling headphones for 7 years now, and I’m not about to give them up.

  • @[email protected]
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    51 year ago

    Germany got it removed for more than 6 years ago. My last capable phone was the Samsung S3.

  • @[email protected]
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    210 months ago

    I’d say AM radio is a better safety feature for Australians at least, since the ABC broadcast emergency warnings via their AM stations.