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Merger?

It seems like there's been reports that Sprint will merge with another company for the past 10+ years. Even if T-Mobile agrees I wonder if regulators would approve it since that would result in less competition.
 
bcrichster said:
Seen a link earlier that FCC was gonna push to make all smartphone FM capable for in case the internet goes down.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/blues...m-radio-smartphone-wp-bsi-20170219-story.html

Good idea, really but I assuming it's just a ploy to keep radio stations in business. Even so.. Go FM!
Click to expand...
Sponsored by Clear Channel is it? Although if the internet goes down, I suspect all the radio stations are internet dependant, nothing is really local any more, no local DJs and presenters, so the stations will probably all go off the air as well.
 
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The problem is that in many cases it's not just a matter of the FM radio not being active, but of there being no antenna connection to the necessary pins on the chip. So even if you plugged headphones in (which act as the FM antenna) and loaded the necessary firmware it wouldn't work. You do have to design this in, just having the feature in the SoC isn't enough.

Apple would be particularly difficult here, since they removed the analogue headphone jack and the lightning connector has no analogue signal support (USB-C does have a couple of pins that could be used for analogue connections). So in the unlikely event that they did order Apple to implement this in future devices, their options would be to mix analogue and digital signals on the same lines and rely on filtering to separate, or re-introduce the headphone jack. Hmm, I'm liking the sound of that... ;)
 
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