i know nokia have just brought in the visual radio but to me this seems just an excuse to charge us for an enhanced rds service.
as far as I'm aware, rds is carried along with the FM signal to the radio. then all thats needed is the software to decode and display the information.
surly an app could be written to do this on a smart phone?
are there any RDS Radio apps out there?
that is a very good point i must say.. i know nothing about radio frequencies really but i must say that if it was so.. does that mean if i have a phone that has visual radio, i can view the information of the song that is playing etc etc.. :s
I think RDS needs also hardware (i.e., it can't just be done with a software app).
VisualRadio is also much more than what RDS can provide; with RDS most radio stations seem to just broadcast their name, sometimes little commercials (very limited number of characters).
With VisualRadio you can get song details, artist background/album info, polls, competitions, ringing tones, graphics/logos, give feedback on songs/station, advertisements (what else), etc. And it is bi-directional.
RDS doesn't come near that type of interactivity.
Anyway, the radio station must support VisualRadio.
N/A wrote:I think RDS needs also hardware (i.e., it can't just be done with a software app).VisualRadio is also much more than what RDS can provide; with RDS most radio stations seem to just broadcast their name, sometimes little commercials (very limited number of characters).
With VisualRadio you can get song details, artist background/album info, polls, competitions, ringing tones, graphics/logos, give feedback on songs/station, advertisements (what else), etc. And it is bi-directional.
RDS doesn't come near that type of interactivity.
Anyway, the radio station must support VisualRadio.
you are totaly right,
but even though rds is limited compared to visual radio, its free
more on rds here
I think many are missing an important point. Visual radio, is screen stuff that you pay for while listening to radio, and you might even have the phone in the pocket - not to mention the lack of radiostations broadcasting visual radio - visit their website.
RDS sends a lot of usefull info encoded on the radio signal. One of the most usefull is - not the radio station name - but the frequencies of the surrounding senders, sending the same channel, making you able to stay tuned to the same radio station, while moving in a train or car, bus etcetc. There are also traffic info in the RDS, some stations send the current song title as well etc.
But the feature about the surrounding senders, is about the most important, and the station name the most visible, that just makes me p****d, when I think of Nokia NOT choosing to include such an obvious feature, just to push their customers to pay for something that noone wants, noone can get (largely) and Nokia is not even earning the money.
For the hardware part, I imagine (Hope) Nokia is using the processor to decode (DSP feature)t he radio signal, making it quite easy to add the decoding of RDS as well. However, if they use a dedicated chip to do radio, and this chip does not do RDS, we are stuffed.
If someone care to do some programming, they should be able to make some sense of the radio programmed for arm linux AND capable of RDS for the empeg car stereo. Software is opensource (I think) and therefore can - respecting the opensource license - be picked quite easily at www.empeg.com (follow links to source - the product was shut down long ago - therefore the need to opensource the OS)
The FM radio is a dedicated/separate chip (not done via any DSP handling the cellular modem, or part of the application processor).
Then it would be interesting to know if the chip has RDS features 😉
At least on the N91, if you open it up, you should see/find a Philips TEA5761 FM radio chip. This page seems to indicate that the '5761' doesn't have RDS, but a '5764' would: http://www.nxp.com/news/infocus/fm_radio_solutions/index.html
I just posted the question on the french nokia support site, just in case they have the latest chip in N80 - you never know. I do not have the courage to open my own 😊
I will post the entertaining answers here.
Here I what I imagine I will get:
"Dear Sir
We are happy to have received your question, unfortunately your question does not fall in any of your categories, therfore I cannot only suggest actions, that helps the majority of problems. Did you try to switch your phone off and back on, and did this change the symptoms.
Hope this helps
Your Nokia support team 😊"
About the radio chip in N80, Nokia actually DID come back with a qualified answer - I did not like it, but hey. So in respect of their profesionalism, here the answer:
Dear Sir Nielsen,
Thank you for contacting the Nokia Support.
I�m sorry, but I can not give you that kind of information, because it�s confidential.
Please don't hesitate to contact us again if you have any further questions.
Yours faithfully
Ali
NOKIA Customer Service