Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Obvious (Score 1) 350

Well, it takes a bunch of time and effort to implement and test it, and the primary middle man [the carriers] have a vested interest in not having it, for a feature that can only work for some users [people who use wired earphones].

And the carriers are working on get at least some emergency messages to get sent to cell phones via SMS's, which everyone with a cell phone can get [and you may even get them if you don't have a working cell phone account, same as making a 911 call], which works on the vast majority of phones, regardless of what happens to be connected to it or what mode it's in [except airplane mode, but FM would also be disabled in that mode]. And the phone normally is configured to alert the user they have received a text message.

And hours after the initial 'event' most people will have moved to where a radio and/or tv will be to learn more about it.

So, IMHO, this is really just a made-up issue [presenting it as a safety issue] by an industry that is losing listeners and ad-revenue.

Comment Re: Obvious (Score 4, Informative) 350

So, for a bunch of people, the FM feature would never work, because they don't use wired headphones.

"Please plug in a wired headset to enabled this feature".

A non-trivial number of people:
-just use it as a hand-held device, holding it up to their head when using it as a phone
-have a wireless headset

And it can't be great for those that do, because you don't know how long the antennae is, or how it's terminated [or even more fun, splitters so the port drives two sets of headphones].

These problems aren't insurmountable, but it all takes a bunch of time and effort [so it would add to the cost of every phone], along with competing goals of two separate wireless industries [FM Radio vs cellular providers]. And given that the cellular providers are a much bigger industry than FM Radio in the US, it seems unlikely that FM Radio will be able to give a large enough 'contribution' to Congress and/or the FCC to make this happen [and there definitely doesn't seem to be enough actual end users clamoring for this to get them to do it].

Comment Re:Kangaroo Court! (Score 1) 114

He's on trial for being stupid. If he had just stuck with "I can teach you how to beat a polygraph test", he would be still be fine.

But [allegedly], he claimed he could help one or more people specifically beat a FBI polygraph test, and presumably there is an antiterrorist law about how you can't help someone lie to the FBI when they are required to tell the truth.

Comment Re:Obvious (Score 5, Informative) 350

Because the article is very misleading.

Smartphones MAY have a chip in them that is capable of receiving FM transmissions [probably as part of the Qualcomm/whomever chip for processing cell phone signals].

But not a matter of 'just turn it on' and everything magically works.

You need an antennae/other external hardware that receives those signals properly. I'm not an antennae engineer, but you either need a separate antennae [which would totally be a non-starter] or you have to compromise the design of existing antennae, because now it has to work for more frequencies.

You also need the software side to work. Since the signal is [most likely] coming from the cellular chip, it also affects the separate baseband software, as well as the main OS.

Then they need to see how it affects battery life with an additional radio turned on, as well as how it affects cellular, wifi and bluetooth reception/transmission.

And don't forget that NONE of the wireless carriers in the US would want the phone to have this feature, because it means the user can be listening to music that they are streaming to their phone FOR FREE, and the carrier would be making no money from it at all. They would rather the user just have the choice of 'do without or preload the music on the phone or pay for streaming music on the phone by paying the carrier extra money] (and they would really prefer to prevent that middle option, but that would have been a really tough sell earlier and impossible now].

Finally, these whiners wouldn't stop at just 'enable the FM reception' capability. It would be 'automatically detect an emergency broadcast and switch to FM automatically when one is broadcast'. Which means another radio always be on. And if that happened...how many days before an FM station sent a fake signal that would trigger this feature without really sounding like an emergency broadcast signal, so the phone would automatically switch to their station for a few minutes. And they could just say it was a bug in the cell phone, that they didn't broadcast a full, real emergency signal.

Anyway, Apple never did this, because they want people to get their music from the iTunes music store, and everyone else doesn't because the carriers won't let them [at least here in the US].

Slashdot Top Deals

"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." - Voltaire

Working...