FM Radio

[Perry E. Metzger]

Harald Welte <laforge at openmoko.org> writes:
>> Any plans of adding it in future?
>
> not really.  It's still somewhat of a strange conception to me why
> peopel would be interested in listening to hours and hours of crappy
> commercials interrupted with one or two (mostly crappy, too) songs in
> between, if they have a choice to listen to their collection of .ogg
> (and patent-encumbered .mp3) files.

For myself, I use the FM radio on my MP3 player to listen to news and
public affairs programming while exercising in the gym.  The anger I
feel when I hear about what's been happening in the last 24 hours
usually distracts me far better than music does.

> Furthermore, some countries have some kind of levy-based scheme for
> funding the public broadcasting companies.  This means that they would
> have to pay extra money for a device that has FM radio capabilities.

Some companies that sell MP3 players get around this by turning off FM
capability when the device is shipped to such a country. Ugly, but I
imagine it works for them.

Perry