[slagman5]

Yes thanks, I meant Blackberry.

So if antenna is in your headphones can you not use the radio in your Q5 with non-blackberry branded headphones, like Beats or Sony?

Yes, they all would work, but why the hell would you waste your money on crappy headphones like beats? Oh, because they are trendy. If you actually care about sound quality get yourself a pair of Sennheisers. Cheaper and better, but you can't jump on the "look at me, I have beats" coolwagon, that's the only downside.

?Posted without the aid of AutoCorrect with my physical keyboard via CB10

[John Vieira]

Fm radio uses the blue tooth radio.

It just tunes into a different frequency.

You just need a bluetooth chip that supports Fm frequency, and the software to use it.

It's really not that hard to put together, I'm sure BlackBerry doesn't spend more than a minimal amount of time testing it.

Posted via CB10

[Trees]

I can see it now. Phone's on vibrate mode. Person in important strategy meeting that's been droning on for hours. Can't take it any more, so "simulates" an inbound call, and quietly leaves the room - just in time to tune into the big game or catch up on ESPN radio.

Think there's some real hidden value there.

[willowbeast]

Keep the fm radio. I don't use it often but at least when I want it, it's there.

Posted via CB10

[chalx]

FM radio is nice, bonus feature to have. For many its unimpotant but for some not having it could be a dealbreaker. There is one more aspect of FM vs streaming radio - impact on battery. Streaming has greater battery load than FM.

Posted via CB10

[CTU2fan]

Streaming also eats a lot of data. Found that out when my Q was dropping WiFi and Pandora ate through a bunch of data.

I agree it isn't a huge deal, having FM. I wouldn't want them sacrificing elsewhere to develop it. But that's not the case. Its already in BlackBerry phones, has been for years. Why drop it?

Posted via CB10

[dale-c]

I don't use FM radio since I have a Z10 but I did when I had a phone that did. One thing not mentioned is that there is programing that is not available online. Most sporting events that are on local radio are not streamed. So having an FM radio allows me to pick up a game while I am busy that I could not get otherwise. I don't use it a lot but it's handy. Plus in an emergency it is nice for news and weather.

Posted via CB10

[last_attempt]

FM Radio is something I like and use regularly. I'm lucky to live in an area that has many great stations with quite a few being commercial free. Some are easily as good if not better than online stations in my opinion and the quality of a really well transmitted strong FM signal easily beats many of the lower bit rate mp3 signals sent over the internet.

Having said that I'm a tad disappointed in the Q5 Receiver sensitivity. It will only pick up the strongest local signals clearly I may have been spoilt from using my portable radio the Grundig G8 which has an amazing FM receiver despite its low cost. Hopefully if the classic has FM its better than the Q5's

[goku_vegeta]

I pray to god blackberry doesn't use those parts of the world as it's target audience. Blackberry was originally a premium device, designed with premium features, for people willing to pay a premium. The Classic should not be a device for people who need to nickle and dime their phone plan. Data isn't cheap, but streaming RADIO is not (in $ terms) a meaningful expense to business people.

You obviously don't seem to have understand basic business logic. Minimize costs, maximize profits. Plus, phone plans are pretty garbage in Canada. To top it all off, the developing markets are really the battleground. Mature markets are over saturated. Finally, you remember the BlackBerry Curve series that actually made BlackBerry relevant? Emerging markets helped there too.

Posted via CB10

[goku_vegeta]

I disagree with all your points, especially this one. But it's our difference of opinion (one of us likes the Curve, one of us prefers the Classic) that's letting BBRY stay afloat for now, so carry on...

The BlackBerry Curve outsold everything else in their product line. The points are quite valid, yours on the other hand have been poorly thought out.

Posted via CB10

[VR6]

No. BlackBerry Classic - Full phone specifications
Few smart phones will/do have FM.
There's money in selling you music & data plans.

Many errors on that link. Resolution isn't going to be 1440x1440

[belfastdispatcher]

FM Radio is something I like and use regularly. I'm lucky to live in an area that has many great stations with quite a few being commercial free. Some are easily as good if not better than online stations in my opinion and the quality of a really well transmitted strong FM signal easily beats many of the lower bit rate mp3 signals sent over the internet.

Having said that I'm a tad disappointed in the Q5 Receiver sensitivity. It will only pick up the strongest local signals clearly I may have been spoilt from using my portable radio the Grundig G8 which has an amazing FM receiver despite its low cost. Hopefully if the classic has FM its better than the Q5's

The headset is the FM antenna, try different ones.

[belfastdispatcher]

I hope they drop FM radio. If they want to go the route of streaming, they should promote Spotify or similar service. Would be a great idea to see BBRY move into music and offer streaming from their cloud into the handset, even better if they find a way to do it w/out hitting your data plan (much like bbm and email, back in the day, didn't hit your data plan). Streaming is the future of mobile tech as we put more high-res videos and high-quality FLAC audio content on phones, storage isn't keeping up, and even if it did there's added weight and size dimensions to be dealt with.

They should drop FM radio. Focus on developing tools that are valuable to a broad set of users. Save the space and weight inside the device from the FM antenna. Focus on building what matters - a great music app, a great video player, and ways (via cloud) to stream content to our devices without destroying our mobile phone bill. That's what Amazon attempted (and didn't) do with it's newest phone, when they didn't make Amazon streaming free and unincluded in the data portion of your bill. The street was disappointed with that, and for apple to focus on cramming an FM radio in there would add very little value and take engineers eyes off of more important tasks like updating OS 10, making a better brower, making a better media player, computer to phone sync features, wireless syncing, NFC, wireless charging, etc etc. In the list of things a company should be worried about, FM radio is so low it shouldn't be included. Users who JUST MUST have FM radio can already stream it for free off the websites of (most) major radio stations.

I'd take FM Radio over streaming any time of the day, there's no comparison on the quality of the sound.

[belfastdispatcher]

What streaming service do you use that's worse quality than FM radio?

All of them, driving around Belfast there are no FM black spots, 3G black spots on the other hand are plenty and it will interrupt your radio and even stop it sometimes.

FM Radio doesn't need data and barely uses your battery.

Stream some radio on a hike and within a few hours your battery will be dead.

[slagman5]

Not belitlling your post. Your concern is "always being able to stream" and not "sound quality." I take NYC for granted that I never lose cell service. In the rare instances I do, it's momentary (30-45seconds) between underground, non-wired subway stations. Since I never lose cell service, for me the LTE music streaming (Pandora, Spotify, Beats, Apple Radio, etc) vs FM Radio debate is about sound quality, and LTE/WiFi wins over FM Radio every time in my tests.

Sound quality automatically adjusts to the detected bandwidth. If data coverage where he lives is spotty, that will result ina decreased bandwidth, which will affect the quality the streaming service will stream to him, thus affecting sound quality. Not to mention, the sound blanking out constantly while he has no data pretty much means the sound quality is at zero at those moments...

?Posted without the aid of AutoCorrect with my physical keyboard via CB10

[slagman5]

This is partially factually correct if the streaming software does adjust as such, but that's on an app-by-app case basis. The rest of your comment is snide and condescending, a tone that I don't find helpful and will choose not to engage. Please don't troll the forums, it's an insult to our collective intelligence.

Also, replying back with yet another more sarcastic/rude/condescending comment will make me report the post to moderators, which I sincerely don't like doing.

I said nothing condescending in my comment... No sound is 0kbps in terms of bitrate. My comment was 100% factual. But ok, sorry if you somehow took that as snide or condescending, or sarcastic, whichever or if you thought it was all of it at once...

[clickitykeys]

This is partially factually correct if the streaming software does adjust as such, but that's on an app-by-app case basis. The rest of your comment is snide and condescending, a tone that I don't find helpful and will choose not to engage. Please don't troll the forums, it's an insult to our collective intelligence.

Also, replying back with yet another more sarcastic/rude/condescending comment will make me report the post to moderators, which I sincerely don't like doing.

Wow, there was absolutely nothing condescending in slagman's post. He merely explained a factual tradeoff that media transmission systems are known to use: signal distortion versus available transmission bitrate.

On topic: I use FM Radio on my Q10 every single day. That's how I get my daily NPR fix, and I'd be bummed if I had to stream my public radio like an iPhone user.

[belfastdispatcher]

Not belitlling your post. Your concern is "always being able to stream" and not "sound quality." I take NYC for granted that I never lose cell service. In the rare instances I do, it's momentary (30-45seconds) between underground, non-wired subway stations. Since I never lose cell service, for me the LTE music streaming (Pandora, Spotify, Beats, Apple Radio, etc) vs FM Radio debate is about sound quality, and LTE/WiFi wins over FM Radio every time in my tests.

I would consider 30-45 seconds interruptions a HUGE drop in quality especially when listening to talk shows.

Anyway, the point is not really FM Radio is better, Internet Radio + FM radio is something I used to have on an old Ericsson dumb phone, why are we always prepared to accept less?

Sure it doesn't affect you much in NYC, always a good signal, plenty WIFI and a plug close by to charge. But the rest of the world is not that convenient, there's times when battery takes first priority and that puts radio streaming out of the question.

This reminds me, BIS did wonders for streaming, I could stream radio on GPRS at 100mph in the car, not great quality but I wasn't listening to music.

[belfastdispatcher]

This is partially factually correct if the streaming software does adjust as such, but that's on an app-by-app case basis. The rest of your comment is snide and condescending, a tone that I don't find helpful and will choose not to engage. Please don't troll the forums, it's an insult to our collective intelligence.

Also, replying back with yet another more sarcastic/rude/condescending comment will make me report the post to moderators, which I sincerely don't like doing.

It's also rude to threaten people with reporting to moderators, you either you do it or you don't, no need to talk about it on the forums.

[slagman5]

You're right there's no place for baseless comments, but standing up for the forum rules that you'll report abusive/rude/condescending posts that violate our guidelines isn't just good sense, it's standing up for the right thing, it's saying to trolls that you and the community won't be a place to foster their ill-will.

It's rude, derogatory, immature, mean spirited, unhelpful, condescending, selfish and factually incorrect opinion sharing that's driving great users to either post less or not at all. Just this week the 2nd thread with leaked classic photos was locked after trolls took over and turned it into a pissing match. It took less than a few hours and not even 2 pages on his second thread before it locked and he said he wasn't going to post anymore, or would seriously consider lurking.

Other than the rude/horrible posts -- which until now I truly believed most of us didn't like but tolerated because they so often come from users with 100's+ (even 1,000+) posts and the users rarely were publically reprimanded -- so other than that, I didn't think anyone would defend a rude post and the user it came from.

Disagree with me. Hold other opinions. Want different things, even argue the technical/factual merits of hardware/software/anything-BlackBerry. But for the good of this site, for standing up for the community it should be, for the purposes of a friendly, free, and fun public discourse, please don't ever tell a user it's rude to click the warning icon, seen at the top of every post, to report posts in poor taste to forum mods. That is nothing short of bullying a user to NOT follow the rules, and to ENCOURAGE a troll. Defend a friend, we all understand. But bully another user to make room in the thread for someone to continue to post mean, rude, sarcastic, unhelpful comments? That's over the line.

I have a thick skin and can take the bullying, but this site shouldn't be about that. I don't think everyone else always will, and we've certainly lost good members over a lack of rule enforcement and bullying by forum members, ignoring the rules. Why not worry about those we've lost - and what we can do to keep this a civil place - than focus on how you don't think users should be open about their willingness to keep this a safe, fun, free, civil place to discuss all things Blackberry?

Actually, that thread with the leaked Classic photos and info was locked because of one troll. The rest of us were defending the OP...

?Posted without the aid of AutoCorrect with my physical keyboard via CB10

[seascape]

No. BlackBerry Classic - Full phone specifications
Few smart phones will/do have FM.
There's money in selling you music & data plans.

You are wrong, Bookshelf. The correct answer to the OP's question is yes, the Classic does have FM radio. It's even listed on the spec sheet you linked to.

For the record, the official specifications for the device are here.

[Hevroth]

You are wrong, Bookshelf. The correct answer to the OP's question is yes, the Classic does have FM radio. It's even listed on the spec sheet you linked to.

For the record, the official specifications for the device are here.

Since this thread has been bump'ed, does anyone know how to access the FM radio on the Classic?

(as a sidenote, I noticed my Classic has some random AT&T stuff here and there even though I bought it unlocked from ShopBB... anyone else had this?)

[kitmo]

You have to use the native Music App. I am just learning the Classic ropes so I am not good at describing the technical things, but I have my music downloaded onto the Blackberry and when I open the music app, I get my playlist and off to the left at the bottom there are 3 small horizontal lines (don't know the name for the symbol) and you push that symbol and the list comes up with the radio. If you want to listen to the radio aloud without ear buds, you have to go to audio and press speaker and leave the ear buds in the phone. Hope you understand my info. LOL