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Would Epic have FM?

taylormah

Well-Known Member
Original Galaxy S had it and seems like Vibrant does not have it. Anybody heard anything about Epic having it?
 
FM doesn't seem to be as popular of a feature as it is overseas, so probably not. I'm not saying there are not any folks that want it, just that more want high MP cameras w/ flash, HD recording, GPS, front facing camera, etc....
 
Two words, Radio Time they have a Android app it receives most if not all (check your local listings) local stations and most internet stations. Low bandwidth consumption and it saves you from looking like Fred Flinstone in front of other people although there are FM tuner Android apps still available on the interwebz.

Search for RadioTime or Radio Time in the market you'll find it but it might not be free I think it's a few bucks but it's a great app and unlimited unlike Pandora.
 
There's an easy answer if the question is, "will owners of a rooted Epic4g ever have FM?" -- "Does it contain a chip that can be tweaked and teased into receiving and decoding FM stereo transmissions between 88 and 107MHz?"

Now, if you want to know whether SPRINT is likely to release the Epic4G with official FM support, I'd say, "probably not", just because it would almost certainly entail IP licensing royalties to Broadcom (or whomever makes the chip), offering free content to customers that's not directly controlled by Sprint and might compete with SprintTV, and basically the fact that almost nobody in America actually cares about FM, because we can stream data in realtime all day from just about any radio station we actually care about, anyway.

As I think everyone here has started to discover, when you're talking about chipsets capable of software-defined radio with FPGAs and onboard DSPs that have more computing power than the sum total of every computer known to have existed prior to 1985, the line between "can" and "can't" starts to come down to licensing and marketing agreements more often than it comes down to hard engineering constraints, and the list of things you can do if you don't care whether it has the official blessing or approval of anyone grows exponentially larger :cool:
 
Well, ok, that particular statement was a bit of hyperbole, but it's not a particularly *huge* exaggeration if you only count computers owned by private companies and individuals.

The radio chip in the Nexus One is a pretty fascinating chip. I don't remember the URL offhand, but I know there's a group of ham radio operators who've been *all over* that chip trying to figure out what it can *really* be pushed and prodded into doing... limited mainly by the fact that, like just about everything in a phone, the official datasheets for it aren't public (they've been scanned and posted online to the point where they might as well be, but technically they're a trade secret normally available only under NDA), and the only way for a mortal to get a hold of the chips is to basically take a broken phone and salvage the chip from it (easier said than done).
 
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