FM Radio on your Phone
If you are ever looking for an example of special interests
preventing us from having useful services, here is one that really irritates
me.
I suspect many of your first thoughts is “Who cares.” I have an app that is much more customizable
and user friendly. I can create personalized playlists, find new artists, and
so on.
But there are a lot of advantages of the direct FM signal.
FM radio doesn’t use your data allocation. If you never hit
your limit anywhere you might not care about this one, but it is nice to know
you can listen all day without any concern.
FM radio works when the power goes out (the tenth
anniversary of hurricane Katrina should make the importance of this
obvious). FEMA wants to unlock your
phone for this reason alone, but they haven’t been able to.
The FM signal works in a lot places where your cell signal
drops out.
FM radio is local. Listening supports local businesses (the
stations and the advertisers), so if you support eating local or buying local
campaigns, this one is for you.
What irritates me the most is that these chips are already
in our phones. The reason we don’t have
them is that the service providers keep the chips turned off. They won’t turn them on, even if you ask. The app companies (Spotify, Apple) want to
force you to rely on their services. The
cell service providers want you to use up your data allocation. It is pure selfishness.
There is one solution. A company called NextRadio created an
app that unlocks the radio receiver. I
don’t know enough about the technology, but it works of the cell phone service
goes along. It just works on Android. At
first, only Sprint went along. Now, I
think all service providers (or at least all the main ones) accept it. So if you have an Android phone you can
unlock your FM receiver.
The app also creates a reasonably good user interface. It can’t do what Spotify et al can do because
you are limited by the available FM stations.
But searching and navigating are easier. I am not here to promote this
particular app, but as a user experience designer I have to at least make a
note of it.
