New at the 2009 CES show is the iCap. MP3+FM+headgear.
Apple is Jobs-idiosyncratic. I guess that Jobs doesn’t listen to radio, so why would anyone else want to?
I know it’s not the most cost-effective way to listen to the radio, but I frequently use my iPhone, connected to the slower EDGE** network, to stream NPR from the Pandora app. The fact that EDGE is available everywhere my iPhone works makes it even more reliable on the beach, because from where I am, the big antennas on Mt Wilson (north of Pasadena) don’t have line of sight to the walkway by the beach down in Redondo Beach.
It acts like a regular radio, except for having many more stations to choose from.
**EDGE is a slower network, frequently compared to a 56K modem, plus or minus, which makes the 24K streams come in quite well.
In San Francisco the number one radio station in the market is still KGO, an AM station. They do news-talk.
It helps them that with all the hills around here, most FM stations can’t reach very far, whereas AM stations can reach half the state.
Ed
I had a CD walkman with FM/AM and TV 2-13 same for a cassette walkman.
With digital TV there will go all TV because most TV stations will mapping to a virtual channel number. (But not all), so you’d have to add PSIP to the devices and UHF antennas would be larger.
You can buy AM/FM radios very cheap, around 10 bucks so it makes no sense to add them to MP3 and make them bulkier. Just buy the AM/FM if you want that and carry two of them.
Neither of them are very big
I have a Sony CD walkman that will play MP3s burned onto a data CD and it has AM/FM/TV audio (2-13)/Weather Band. The interface is annoying but it’s basically workable. I got it at Best Buy a few years ago around Christmas, so I’d bet they’re still being made.
Thanks for all your responses, guys. One thing I forgot to mention in my initial post: When I bought my current radio walkman, I noticed, in the Best Buy, a portable CD player that had both an MP3 player and AM/FM. It was the ONLY thing that had both an MP3 player AND FM/AM. (This must be the device that Derleth mentioned in his last post above.) This proves that there’s nothing technologically prohibitive about putting both in the same device, but what in the WORLD is the point of having both an MP3 player and a CD player? With the former, you have unlimited songs! What do you need CD’s for? The only reason I didn’t buy that was because I don’t want to lug around something that won’t fit in my pocket.
Interface2x: It’s not included in an iPod, but they have add-ons that do it.
Luigi Novi: It says that it supports the nano and iPod video. I wonder if it would work with the iPhone, and if not, whether they’ll eventually make it so.
Absolute: It’s certainly possible that your Sony player does not support Mac OS X, but there is nothing fundamentally incompatible about Apple and non-Apple devices. Maybe 10 years ago that was the case, but these days, Apple is a very standards-based company.
Luigi Novi: So why do the salespeople at Best Buy or the Sony store tell me they can’t be used with Apple?
Absolute: Sounds about right to me. I hate radio. I hate commercials. The whole reason I have an MP3 player is to avoid listening to the radio.
Luigi Novi: But then where do you first hear new songs that you decide you like enough to download?
Absolute: If I want the news, I will call up CNN.com on my iPhone and read it myself, not wait 5 minutes for some announcer to get around to talking about the topics I am interested in.
Luigi Novi: You read while walking down the street? If I did that I’d bump into stuff. Me, I mainly put the news on to pass the time when there’s nothing on the radio that I like, or when I tired of preset music. Plus, Internet access costs more money on the device, whereas radio is free. And as I pointed out in my initial post (and as Ed reiterated), radio is updated more quickly than the Net in emergencies like the 2003 Blackout.
**Deeg: On a side note, is radio switching to all digital? I thought it was just TV?
Derleth: Both AM and FM will work just fine after the digital conversion. If your model also has a TV tuner, that will be the part that doesn’t work anymore. But you’ll still get 1010 WINS just like you always did.
**
Luigi Novi: Really? Well, that’s what the package on my handheld radio Walkman said when I bought it about a year ago. (Or was it only referring to the TV portion?) Thanks.
**Jamicat: My Sansa has FM though…but FM has nothing I wanna hear…or rather I’ve heard what they play ONE MILLION TIMES OVER ALREADY.
Mks57: Two, finding an AM or FM station that doesn’t suck.
**
Luigi Novi: Just out of curiosity, what kind of music do you like that’s not found on FM?
Thanks again, guys.
Well radio isn’t quite what it used to be, instead of taking request, or being an outlet for local acts, or even playing the B sides of albums, they have just become vehicles for commercial entities and play only what that entity owns…namely Clear Channel and it’s distributors and venues.
So, anything they aren’t directly selling will never get played.
Which is why they play the same lame shit over and over, instead of playing what the audience would like.
I like Rock… FROM ALL DECADES…not just the Nicklecrack decade. :mad:
I have a Sansa Fuze with FM radio. It’s handy for picking up the news on the go, or sometimes when you get bored with the selection on the device.
About five years ago, I bought a DAB/FM portable digital radio. Both AM and FM stations were being rebroadcast in DAB in Toronto.
I then discovered that drivetime radio sucks. The radio has sat unused for well over a year.
Note: the standard for US digital radio is as far as I know unique to the US. Even Canada doesn’t use it (though that may change). This may also be a factor.
I haven’t shopped for them in a while, but the last time I was looking for a combo player a few years ago, I noted that all the models that were MP3/CD players, none of them had any onboard memory. They were designed to play CD-Rs that had MP3s burned on them. These weren’t like MP3 players with tons of memory that had all the extra hardware to read a CD added; rather they were regular portable CD players that had extra processor power to read CD-R files and decode MP3s.
*** Ponder