Most of the phones I’ve had over the last decade have had an FM radio receiver in them. And I used to use the feature quite a lot, when out and about on a little walk. But I’ve always found FM to be a poor choice in a mobile, for two reasons:

1. An AM receiver would allow me to listen to sport on 5live. Sport being much more time relevant than music.
2. A DAB receiver would allow most of the FM channels (without the pirate interference that’s endemic in this part of London) and both 5live and 5live Sports Extra.

I can understand why FM was chosen over AM (the majority of stations are FM and there’s probably only room for 1 receiver), but I don’t understand why phones into which the manufacturer is piling more and more high technology (touchscreen, NFC, barcode readers, wi-fi) would choose FM over DAB, especially when DAB is being pushed so hard by governments.

So it’s good to see someone bringing out a DAB attachment for phones.

Every once in a while a device comes along that makes you wonder why it wasn’t available ages ago. For me, the Nokia Digital Radio Headset DAB falls into this category. It brings the wide, wide range of DAB radio stations to your Nokia mobile, cunningly disguised as a standard headset. Look a little closer however and there are a couple of clues as to its real purpose.

Now, it looks like a clunky solution and there is always the problem that it’s Nokia only¹, and yes it costs a bit. But given that this is a first attempt, there should be other solutions coming along soon. And a similar setup shouldn’t take too long to come along. Especially to Android, since so many crackpots are making apps for it and all the manufacturers are all implementing standard chargers…

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¹ – And this former Nokia fanboy is very much a former fanboy. Yes, six of my nine phones may have been Nokias but the last three have been (a) not Nokia and (b) better than Nokia.