India calls for all mobile phones to include FM radios India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has issued an advisory reminding mobile phone manufacturers they should include an FM radio tuner in their products. Yes, you read that right: an FM radio. "It has been brought to the notice of the Ministry that during the last 4/5 years there is a drastic …
They don't want to waste space for the FM antenna inside. IIRC many used the headphone wire grounded by the headphone jack as the "antenna", but since the headphone jack is rapidly disappearing it isn't so easy.
FM's frequency range means a 6x larger antenna is needed for the same gain versus the lowest cellular bands. That's a lot of internal space to waste for something most people don't want (apparently even in India, as this article seems to indicate most phones sold there don't support FM)
Unfortunately I can only upvote once...
This "we don't sell it because it doesn't sell" self-fulfilling prophecy is one of my pet peeves. It's a random, arbitrary marketing decision, unfortunately very easy to justify afterwards: "See, since we stopped selling it, we didn't sell a single unit! Ergo, we were right to stop selling it, am I not a marketing genius?"...
"Is this the flip side of "we never sell those because they're always out of stock"?"
I remember once being told "sorry we don't stock those anymore because there's no demand, you're the second person I've told that today." Clearly irony detectors were out of stock as well.
Finally had to get a new phone without a headphone jack. Yes, they still exist, but the Venn diagram of features I'd like, such as more than 6 months support and screen less than 12", has an ever-shrinking intersection, and this is one I thought I could live with the compromise. It is possibly even more annoying than I thought it would be:
1. Bluetooth. Latency issues, duolingo in particular is simply not usable because of microphone switching. Having to stop listening to things because you didn't charge the earbuds today. Most devices can't share audio to multiple devices (no simple 3.5mm splitter for train or plane use), brings us to...
2. USB audio, can't charge while using (natch), unless you get an even more unwieldy PD splitter. Patchy quality of any affordable active converter even from a good brand, crackling I just never had with an onboard jack (with the attendant bafflement that the phone has a 32bit 384kHz DAC but even the official dongle is 24bit 192kHz, okay I don't believe for one moment any dog, let alone human, could tell the difference, but just why?), incompatibility of passive converters (and no charging for you my friend unless you go active anyway). Jack-in-the-box headphone dongle sticking out of your pocket when in use.
Yes, most of these can be fixed by paying a lot of money (apart from the USB audio charging and jack in the box issues), but a decent pair of wired earbuds is £15 and will last decades. A pair of AirPods costs £180 with "up to" 6 hours charge while the batteries are good. Not having a headphone jack allows my current phone to be about 1mm thinner than my old S4mini that had one, while being 20mm taller and 10mm wider, so long as you ignore 1mm of camera lenses. I'm so glad they've been able to save that space.
If you want to forget all about durability and serviceability (and dual SIMs WITH microSD, as on XCover), and you want to spend a lot more money, then there are two others the same size: ASUS ZenFone 9 (3.5mm jack) and Samsung Galaxy S23 (no 3.5mm jack).
But I'd rather not pay too much for my phone, and I'd like all the ports, with durability and serviceability. But smaller? Nope, as you said, that's the size floor these days.
XCoverPro now obsolete due to google bloat and insisting 500mb is a shortage of space. Liked it wile it was usable. Bedside alarm now.
XCover Pro 6 looks smashing (including pogo charging but finding a base is not so easy). Would track one down if I was due to change but have a phone/pda to play with now. 2 USB C slots, and headphone socket.
but a decent pair of wired earbuds is £15 and will last decades.
If your 15 quid headphones are decent and last decades then I'm very impressed.
My okay wired earphones were about 70 quid, but have lasted many years. Cheaper ones used to last about 12 months.
My current (sony) bluetooth ones were 20 quid and sound fine. They also last many hours on a charge.
A pair of AirPods costs £180 with "up to" 6 hours charge while the batteries are good.
You're comparing a good quality pair of headphones with a 15 quid pair of headphones though, that's not a fair comparison. You can pay way more than that for wired buds, just as you can get perfectly reasonable 'knock off' airbuds cheap too.
Earbuds, not headphones. Although £30 will get you okay over-ear phones too, I got at least ten years out of a pair of HD 202s, the only time I've ever had wired headphones fail has been a cable failure (and on more expensive models you can, gasp!, replace the cable). AirPods to earbuds is reasonable, because that's essentially all they are (they are not custom IEMs), and my note about batteries in this comparison is specific, because anything with an in-built lithium battery will gradually lose battery life, until you buy a new one or (if possible) have the battery replaced, which means that after a few years even expensive bluetooth earbuds will start to have charge issues. I've used cheap bluetooth earbuds before (not in fact as cheap as the ones you've found) and the battery life quickly fell to the point I would have to make sure to charge them beforehand if I wanted to use them in the gym (one place wireless really is useful). I've got a similar anker pair to your sonys, the battery is tolerable but doesn't last anywhere near as long as claimed and will be noticeably less in another couple of years.
I like the headphone jack as well, but I must disagree with your estimated costs and lifetimes of headphones:
"a decent pair of wired earbuds is £15 and will last decades."
The way I use them, that's a reasonable price and it will last months. They tend to be made from the thinnest wires possible, and some part of the wire breaks after enough uses and movement. I don't tend to mind that too much since they are quite cheap, but I've never seen a cheap set that lasts very long if it's frequently used. More expensive headphones tend to last longer because they often have replaceable cables (and if they don't or the cable is custom, don't buy them), but that's a very different level of product and they are more expensive.
"A pair of AirPods costs £180 with "up to" 6 hours charge while the batteries are good."
Don't buy those. You can spend a lot less and get similar devices that have as good if not better battery life. Similarly, don't buy the cheapest possible pair either. In case you are interested, there is a person (not me, and I don't know them) who has reviewed hundreds of models of cheap Bluetooth headphones and posts those reviews on the website scarbir.com. I bought a pair for about £30 which have lasted over two years so far without noticeable degradation in the battery and get 7-8 hours on a charge. They do run out of power if you use them long enough so they're not for everybody, but as I tend not to use them for that long and they charge automatically when stored, it's rarely been a problem for me.
I don’t see any possibility of a useful FM antenna inside a smartphone, unless the broadcast signal transmitter is very close. A quarter wave to cover down to 98MHz should vary in length up to about 75cm. Those earphone cable antennae suffered badly from the wearer moving around.
Put a little popper antenna coax cable connector on the outside of the case and then we are in business.
> Those earphone cable antennae suffered badly from the wearer moving around
YMMV, but back when my phones had this feature I've used it a couple times, and it always worked just fine, phone in my pocket, earphone on my ears or, phone on the table, earphones on the table too. No suffering whatsoever.
I miss this feature (and the earphone jack...), I mean I can stream radio from the Internet, but indeed, this adds several additional potential points of failure. Radio station -> my phone was much safer in case of an emergency (hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, floods, volcanoes, whatever your local environment has thought up to get rid of those pesky humans).
The length of the wire matters in relation to the length of the waves it is trying to receive. Wrapping a 75 cm wire around a phone chassis that's 15 cm in its longest dimension makes it act equivalently to a 15 cm wire for reception purposes.
There is none, you can see it in lower end models having jacks (compare Galaxy A23 and Galaxy S23). Apple started doing it so they could sell accessories and everyone started copying them at the premier end of the market (I suppose that's logic of a sort.). It lets you make the phone thinner, but at the same time they're getting taller and wider.
"Those useful little things that could go a week without needing to recharge."
Take a smartphone and try using it as little as you did a feature phone. I've done that before, and it also lasts a week. The one I used, which wasn't designed with a massive battery, lasted several days with the hotspot function turned on and in use, because I didn't have other stuff on it and I wasn't turning on the screen. Now take a smartphone and a feature phone, both fully charged, and have them call each other, with something to alternate sending noise through each one. Wait until one of them dies, and check how the length changes. Unless the smartphone's battery is old, you can usually make calls on it for much longer than you can on the feature phone.
The feature phone didn't last longer because it was so much more efficient, but because it was less frequently in use. People like to use the features of smartphones enough to take that tradeoff.
Maybe I'm the odd one out there, but I still listen to FM radio stations a lot. That's why I'm still holding out on replacing my Samsung A50, as new models in the same category have lost their FM radio, even those that still have a 3,5mm jack.
On a side note, for what I can see, new Qualcomm based phones have lost their FM Radio capabilities, but most Mediatek based ones still have it (when coupled with a 3,5mm jack, natch)
You are not alone.
FM radio is a favourite around these parts and would be sorely missed (thankfully we're thoroughly unhip and can bear to use a 'phone that still provides it).
We still have little MP3 players 'cos they will do FM as well. Far lighter than lugging the 'phone around when planting out in the garden and it has a clip - no slipping out and disappearing into the water butt!
Big FM radio fan here too.
The 'it just works' aspect is great under normal circumstances, but also very useful in failure conditions. Where I live, power cuts are not unknown and then the trusty battery powered radio is the only way to get any information. Past few storms have knocked out electricity so home broadband stops. The local celltower doesn't have backup power so after a short while any hope of having internet via mobile device is off the table as well (as an aside, there's also talk of the phone system here switching to VOIP only, so also have the prospect of totally losing voice comms in the event of a power cut)
The Indian government love Internet shutdowns. They've never met a citizen they couldn't ignore just by shutting down the Internet in the area.
But, But!... They have realised that with no FM radio they can't issue the (one-way) instructions they want to send to their (now silenced) citizens!
How can we run an increasingly authoritarian government without being able to tell people what to do? I know, we will insist that FM radios are included so we can give orders, without allowing them to discuss or organise.
They're easier than building a computer would be, but you can't just take a receiver, an old laptop, and a bunch of wires and build one out of it. There are some ways you can make a machine not intended for the purpose end up emitting a signal, but one that's very weak and hard to tailor for your purposes. Most attempts will end up with something that has worse range and fidelity than a cheap WiFi router. DIY FM transmitters aren't a solution to emergency communications.
When I worked for Sony Ericsson, I had the task of traveling the world to learn about how people used mobile phones in different places. I went to rural India. The real expert was the Nokia anthropologist Jan Chipchase so much of my work was just reading his research. Bear in mind that this work was done over a decade ago and was for feature phones, but I suspect that much still holds true.
India needs special phones. In poor areas your phone is a status symbol, but it has to have utility. It’s why Chipchase added a torch. Farmers who go out at night to turn on the irrigation want torches. There are a lot of power cuts and batteries are expensive. A radio also adds justification to this major purchase.
India has four religions: Hindu, Muslim, Bollywood and Cricket. It is the secular ones of these which dictate phone requirements. Most cricket is (or was) broadcast on AM, so we added AM to the Sony Ericsson phones. The country is loud. Everywhere is noisy, so we added big speakers, particularly for listening to Bollywood music.
We also learned a lot about resale value, supply chain, dust (lots of it), language support and regionalisation. We debated adding a field in the phone book for caste, but were told that people just know. A bit like gaydar.
It was a long time ago, before apps and before the kitchen sink attitude to features. We had Cybershot phones for photography and Walkman for music fans. There was proper consumer segmentation for devices. MeitY is right in wanting features that suit the nation but it’s a lot more than FM radio.
I used to listen to the football via my local BBC radio station (soccer for our US friends) via my phone when out in the garage, washing the car or doing the gardening.
I was known to have one wired earbud in my ear to listen to the game when we went shopping in town too.
Can't do that now because phones don't have FM receivers and broadcast licenses prevent the streaming of matches due to copyright restrictions.
A common use for FM on my phone is listening to pre- & post- match football claptrap on local radio while going to and from a match. Much better than trying to stream in the vicinity of a stadium when you're competing with thousands of other people for throughput on overloaded masts, and anyway as you say they cut the internet feed during play and always seem slow to restore it afterwards. (Not to mention that it's only recently that I've had a big enough data allowance to stream.)
Sure, but then again you're supposed to "follow" on Facebook/Twitter, not listen to grandpa's radio...
FM is uncool, DAB is crappy (and people balk at spending that much money), and things which not so far ago were selling points (shortwave...) have gone the way of the Dodo. Everything has been, or is about to be, replaced by Internet, in the name of profit progress.
As someone who lives in an area where disasters happen regularly, i.e. hurricanes, Your phone IS NOT a device to keep you informed in a prolonged emergency. In the majority of real emergencies that will effect cell service the power will be out. Your phone will eventually lose charge. Emergency AM/FM radios are dirt cheap, I assume they are dirt cheap in India as they are all made in China. You buy one with a crank charger to charge the battery. Problem solved.
We had an idiot politician make this same argument a few years ago here in Florida. He was resoundingly laughed at!
I realize that in most areas of the world where you don't have to deal with these things on a recurring basis, preparedness in not a first thought. It should be. My co-workers in other parts of the US found it odd that I own 2 gas generators. I explained that in a prolonged power outage that can happen after a hurricane, 1 generator is not strong enough to power all you need to keep things going. You cannot power 2 refrigerators and a freezer with 1 generator and have enough for lights and to cook (portable stove). running our of food is NOT an option.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
