LG Releases First Smartphone With DAB+ Chip (thestack.com)

An anonymous reader writes: LG have released the first smartphone with built-in DAB+ circuitry,allowing users to listen to digital radio without consuming mobile data bandwidth. The LG Stylus 2 will initially be released in the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, Norway, Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands (perhaps not coincidentally these are among the highest-rate adopters of DAB/DAB+). Patchy coverage and often-poor bitrates have hindered the take-up of DAB/+, which has been in development since the early 1980s, and it's hoped that the shift from the motoring to the smartphone space will alleviate some of the coverage problems that users experienced with the push to DAB-based car radios. No benchmarks on power consumption of the integrated DAB+ circuitry is currently available.

Comments

Re:Worse power consumption than with FM

[clonehappy]

Because unlike FM Stereo, analog TV left a lot of room for improvement. FM Stereo, for most use cases, really actually is "good enough" considering the vast majority of people aren't audiophiles.

Also, the sketchy RF environment inherent in mobile use (such as in the car or handheld device) isn't well suited for digital. Where an analog signal fades for a split second or you get a moment of static, the digital drops out completely, tries to re-sync the stream and has to buffer before it continues playing.

Some things really are just better suited for a down-and-dirty analog connection.