I’m looking to replace my current smartphone, and the fairphone looks very attractive.
Except for one thing: In the fairphone specs I see there is no FM radio, and as I’m using FM radio quite often on my current phone (Dutch Radio 1 news radio) that looks like a deal-breaker for me.
Are there plans to have an FM radio for the fairphone, or are there alternatives available, apart from Internet audio-streaming?
So yes, there’s an integrated FM radio receiver. Today inside a concrete building, whilst very bad weather outside I can get several stations but not Dutch Radio 1.
Later on the day I will try it outside.
With all due respect, but that’s a bit odd reasoning. You cannot guarantee the consistency of the (3G) data connection everywhere in Europe either. You can’t guarantee the availability of a WiFi connection either. Not can you guarantee optimal lighting conditions for taking a picture. Yet all these things are promoted in the specs.
Wouldn’t it speak for itself that an FM radio will have no reception if you’re in an area with a poor FM signal?
Multiple FP1 owners noticed a particularly bad FM radio reception (compared to other FM radio devices) and wrote about it in the forums. Some of them seemed to be really disappointed, so I understand why Fairphone chose to stop advertising the FM radio capability with the FP1U.
Indeed, FP batch 2 user here: I was extremely surprised to discover the presence of the FM radio. And for me, here in my remote french location with plenty of small stations, it works perfectly.
I presume the reception will highly depend on which earplugs you are using; mine (Philips, with mic) are symetric , which gives a reasonable antenna : maybe an asymetric design would sport poorer…
Inside a concrete building with simple cheap earphones I can get several stations, but not Dutch Radio 1
Inside a concrete building with a simple cheap headphone I even get Dutch Radio 1.
Signal by the window good. Signal 7 metres of the window less, but reasonable.
I didn’t check the signal outside yet, the whether is to bad for me.
The speecs include FM Radio but, in my case, I never get it working.
No matter what earphones, the quality is so poor that I get catch only one station. It was a reported problem and fairphone team said they were working on, I ignore if the problem persists.
Yup. I decided to buy a fairphone regardless. Must say I’m not impressed
with the FM radio but I knew it would likely be an issue.
Hardware can’t be changed for the phone I bought, but as I understand it
the software comes with the chipset maker, and that software also has quite
some room for improvement. I know what frequency the station I want to
listen to is on, but the software at random keeps changing the channel
(because reception is poor?), at which point I’ll manually have to change
it back again. Becomes annoying if it happens once every few minutes.
If there is an open source version of the FM radio software I may be able
to fix things myself, but I’m not aware of any such thing existing.
Apart from that minor annoyance I’m a happy fairphone user now.
FWIW, I recently discovered on the F-droid repository an app that seems to be an open source alternative to the current proprietary one. It’s named SpiritF, but I didn’t test it (the current one is enough for me)
[edit] the app is beautiful, but does not seem to work on the FP1…