My symbian has an FM radio built in, the antenna is the earphones which you attach to it. You need the earphones to listen to the radio, even if you put it on speaker.

My android-based smart phone has an FM tuner (HTC Incredible) but why on earth would I use it when I can use pandora?

Nokia sell over 20 different models in the USA with built in FM - http://www.nokiausa.com/find-products/phones [nokiausa.com]

From the US-based perspective I can see your point, but in Realityimpaired's case, being Canadian means he doesn't have the option to listen to Pandora without a VPN.

Being Canadian myself, I worry our government will decide to play along if yours passes this. I agree that it would be nice to have the option but I'm of the mind that my phone should just be a phone.

I wouldn't buy an MP3 player without an FM radio. It's how I listen to NPR. The MP3 part is how I listen to audiobooks and podcasts of NPR shows that aren't carried on my local station or are on when I'm at work.

No, it is free. You may be thinking of groveshark which only had a few day trial on my phone (I don't know what their web based pricing is like). Pandora on mobile actually has fewer audio ads than on the web (and the google on screen ones are as unobtrusive as ads get). The 40 hour/month limit might still apply.

There's probably a number of size and power constraints as well that result in every single leading cell phone lacking this 'feature.'

I can't remember the last mobile phone I had that didn't have an FM radio built-in; certainly my last one (LG Viewty) and my current (HTC Desire) both do; perhaps the situation is different in the States.

Of course whether or not you consider either of these phones to be "leading cell phones" is another matter; the Desire is pretty popular over here at least though.

Not really. many MANY Nokia phones have FM radios in them, even with RDS. It's simply the engineers of the other phones being too lazy to add it, or in the case of the iphone fitting 12 pounds of stuff in a 4 pound bag.

The other problem is that the reception performance of these FM recievers in phones utterly sucks. they are in a nasty RF environment and have the sensitivity of a block of concrete. Only local strong stations come in.

In the case of smartphones.... why. I get pandora and last.fm as well as sirius streaming app on my iphone.

you haven't needed this for well over a decade.

DAT recording has given the garage band studio quality for a long time. Even the higher end sony MiniDisc units from the 90's recorded great and had manual level settings. a cheap mixer and a PC with a soundcard and you are set to go for CD quality and editing the audio.

I helped a band record a AAD Album that sounded better than a pro RIAA recording in 1995 with a DAT recorder recording from 4 microphones into 4 audio tracks. it sounded amazing. and we recorded it in a basement with blankets on the walls and ceiling at 2am to get rid of the traffic low frequency component.

Simple. Very simple. Power. Coverage. Period.

I would personally love to see both AM and FM included in more smart phones. I do not want to see it mandated. That's dumb. This is clearly one of those places where the market is very capable of regulating itself.

AM/FM radio reception has clear advantages of services like Pandora in that AM/FM radio is everywhere. On the other hand, data services are not yet everywhere. And ignoring issues of data coverage, the power required to process an audio stream versus simple AM/FM can be huge. To process an audio stream you need a data network, a radio receiver, a CPU (its data at this point), decompression (CPU and/or dedicated hardware), and a speaker. To process simple AM/FM, you can use a very small, low power, dedicated circuit. And technically, an AM/FM radio could still be used when in airplane mode, which can provided yet additional power savings while still providing for an audio solution.

And even when on the nation's largest carrier, I still regularly find pockets having no data services.

So... Because I like listening to shows like Quirks and Quarks [www.cbc.ca], The Vinyl Cafe [www.cbc.ca], Definitely Not The Opera [www.cbc.ca], and The Ongoing History of New Music [exploremusic.com], I'm obviously an evolutionary reject with an IQ less than 80? Sure. That's sound logic.

Perhaps the idiot here is the one who doesn't realize that broadcast radio includes channels that aren't owned by Clearchannel, and apparently doesn't realize that outside of the intellectual wasteland that is the USA, it's actually really easy to find educational and interesting shows on the radio?

Simple -
1.My favorite radio station at night broadcasts music non stop. I like a lot of songs they broadcast, but do not know the artists and song titles (since the radio station never says them).

2.Radio requires least involvement to listen (turn the tuner on, tune to a station, that's it), compared to records, tapes, CDs or files. Useful when I want to do something that requires a lot of concentration, but still want the music to play in the background.

I find the FM receiver DOES have a purpose on the cellphone. Namely, when you're at a public gym that has various TVs in front of the treadmill or stationary bicycle area. Around here, the sound for those stations are sent to the 88.7, 88.5, etc type stations, at a range just enough for the gym.

So for that reason ALONE do I find that it has a purpose on my cellphone.

You do realize that iOS and Android devices all have NPR tuner apps that let you listen to essentially any NPR station in the country, right?

On your world what prevented the US government from growing in power and abusing the commerce clause to be able to do whatever it wanted?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich [wikipedia.org]