Re: The Nokia N800 Internet Tablet has FM Radio Built-in!
 

Did anyone notice it's an applet? You can install it to your desktop without starting it via xterm

Re: The Nokia N800 Internet Tablet has FM Radio Built-in!
 

It's weird, fm radio is not buffering ;)
It doesn't sound much quieter than the online radio to me. They can be on together.

Re: The Nokia N800 Internet Tablet has FM Radio Built-in!
 

If you're wondering where the radio freq and a few parameters are stored:

gconftool-2 -R /apps/maemo/fmradio

Also I noted an increase in volume when launching from applet than xterm + command line.

Still missing: a record function (with a bit of buffer), but otherwise works great!

Re: The Nokia N800 Internet Tablet has FM Radio Built-in!
 

I can confirm: I've noticed this too :)

What you need is timeshifting and RDS
 

What would be interesting is to find out if the FM Tuner hardware can decode the data carried on the sideband of a FM broadcast. Then you could pull down the song/station/genre info, but even better yet, you could pull down real time traffic info, news, weather info, etc that some stations are putting out on RDS for free...that would make the GPS package really cool if you could overlay real time traffic info.

Even a static display like www.trafficguage.com would be pretty cool.

An additional feature is piping the audio into a MP3 encoder and then buffering up some FM audio so you can skip around or pause ala TiVO. That would be really cool.

Dave

Re: The Nokia N800 Internet Tablet has FM Radio Built-in!
 

@rcull: Thanks for the tip about alarmtool!
I haven't tried it yet, and there's a lot of other experimenting I'm not done with (had to sleep a bit too..), but one thing I noticed is that it appears to be always starting up in earbud mode.. for it to work as a clock radio it should start in speaker mode, or, to be precise, it should always start in the mode it was last set to. At least it seems to switch to earbud mode when I put in the antenna, haven't yet tried to leave it in and stop/start.

As for the sound level, it seems ok if I listen to the earbuds, but the speakers sound much lower to me than the internet radio, at the same volume settings. Strong stations are louder than weak stations, but still not very loud.

Re: N800 FM radio!
 

Well, someone at Nokia probably had a laugh reading that! :D

You could always edit the posting to "doesn't have a TV tuner".. :p
and why not.. anyone looked? I mean, the N800 isn't that much smaller than my 15 year old tiny-LCD portable TV.. then there's always the USB-stick TV tuners, host mode + a powered mini-USB to USB cable should do it, no?

Re: The Nokia N800 Internet Tablet has FM Radio Built-in!
 

With the FM radio application installed there's suddenly an issue with the Internet radio application that didn't exist before:

I have the N800 rigged up with earbuds as antenna (nicely stretched out for best reception), listening to the radio on the speakers. I have the FM radio applet sitting right below the Internet applet, they look very similar, and I can easily switch between them.

The problem is that the Internet radio automatically uses the earbuds because they are plugged in as an antenna for the FM radio! So when I switch from an FM channel to an Internet channel the speaker sound disappears.. and I have to remove the antenna, and then I have to plug it back in when I change back to FM radio (and then that one tends to switch to earbuds instead of remembering the setting, but that's for another problem report).

In short: Now I need a configurable earbuds/speaker selection in the Internet radio application too..! :o

Re: The Nokia N800 Internet Tablet has FM Radio Built-in!
 

The Volume status bar icon should include a control to select speaker or earbud output in addition to the mute and master volume slider controls. Selecting where sound is directed - speakers or earbuds - shouldn't be an application-specific setting.

Re: The Nokia N800 Internet Tablet has FM Radio Built-in!
 

Agreed! I was thinking the same.