There’s been plenty of chatter elsewhere about the presumed beneficial effect of requiring FM tuners in cell phones. Perhaps the best of the lot have come courtesy of Mark Ramsey here and here.
While I’ll happily quibble with Mark and anyone else who suggests that being forced into paying the record industry in exchange for providing free advertising a “performance royalty” is an inevitability, there’s been enough punditry regarding the potential benefits, and the limitations of those benefits, to fill a roomful of radio-sized egos.
On the other hand, I haven’t seen anyone discuss their personal experience with having and using a radio tuner in her or his own cell phone. Oh, and considering that I’ve been walking around the same gym for years realizing that I was the only person in sight wearing an old style Walkman with a radio tuner, I’ve been dreaming of the day when I’d have a tuner-enabled phone.
Now, I’m the first kid on my block to own a shiny new Droid X, which has – ta da! – a radio tuner. (Quick Droid X review: Lacking a doctorate in nuclear physics, I’m not capable of figuring out the whole phone, but it sure is a powerful little toy, er, business tool. If you do happen to have what it takes to pass the Patent Bar, please feel free to teach me all the ins and outs of my new wonderphone.)
Anyway, now that I have the phone of my broadcasting dreams, I thought I’d share my thoughts on this most precious little feature.
By the way, I didn’t buy the phone because it had a tuner. I bought it because of its ginormous display, the 24gb of storage it comes with, the processor, memory, and other tech specs, and blah blah blah. In reality, I had no idea it even had a tuner.
That’s right. As a broadcaster, in considering what cell phone I wanted to be married to for the next two years, I never even considered the presence of a radio tuner as a factor in my purchasing decision. Actually, it never even occurred to me to consider the possibility that various phones I was looking at did or didn’t have radio tuners built into them.
If that thought never crossed my mind, what does that tell you about the typical civilian, er, consumer?
The tuner appeared on my radar almost by accident. If you’ve seen an Android phone, you know that, unlike with the iPhone, before you even start downloading your own apps, the ones that come preinstalled on the phone are all jammed into one giant screen that you scroll through. With a pile of things like “DLNA” and “NFS Shift” already on that screen, it’s easy to miss the icon that reads “FM Radio” if you’re not looking for it.
Yes, the tuner is an FM radio. If you’ve got an AM stick, the Droid X doesn’t know you’re alive. The same goes for HD radio. Additionally, I can’t find anything in the Android Marketplace that approximates the iPhone’s Fstream app, allowing the user to pull up any stream for which they know the URL. (If you know of one, feel free to let me in on it.)
Okay, so how well does the tuner work? Unevenly at best.
In terms of ease of use, on a scale of 1 to 10, it rates a meh. You can scan for signals, but the tuner misses a lot of them if you do that. Manual tuning requires either dragging your finger across the imprecise tuner or hitting the arrow button over and over. There’s no manual frequency input.
The tuner has 20 presets. Woo hoo. When you save a signal, it seems to be a 50/50 bet whether the tuner will pick up the station call letters on its RDS feed. If it doesn’t, you can leave the frequency in place, or you can type in the station name yourself.
And now, the big question…how’s the reception? It’s inconsistent.
Remember that radio you used to own that barely picked up weaker signals? That’s what’s in my phone. On the 10 Freeway near the 15, my phone does not receive KROQ or KYSR at all. KLOS sounds fine; Jack is basically okay, but a bit compromised. The local Riverside signals, by and large, sound relatively good, but KCXX, a class A throwing off 180 watts at a couple time zones above average terrain, is also nearly nonexistent.
Driving down Interstate 10, in an area where our stick fries eggs, I decided to A/B between my car tuner and my Droid tuner. The competition wasn’t close. Reception on the Droid was usually acceptable, but it picket fenced a little. The car tuner blew it away.
Here’s my take on the FM tuner in my Droid X: You’ve got to be pretty passionate about listening to FM radio to want to use your phone – and its battery – to do so. As a broadcaster, I’m plenty passionate about listening to FM radio. (I’m equally passionate about listening to AM radio, but my Droid isn’t going to be much help there, is it?)
If you’re a casual radio consumer, and you can listen to your own music, Pandora, or a world of other choices on your Droid, would you really choose terrestrial radio over that tuner?
