Apple is making some big changes to Apple Music Radio today. For starters, the company announced that Beats 1 - the flagship Apple Music radio station - will be rebranded to Apple Music 1. Beyond that, we'll also see the addition of two new radio stations: Apple Music Hits and Apple Music Country, with the content of both being fairly self-explanatory.
College students in the US are about to head back to school, and unsurprisingly, many companies have rolled out their student subscription plans once more. SiriusXM threw its hat in the student plan ring today, announcing one that heavily discounts the cost of its standard Premier plan. That's all well and good, but is it enough to go up against giants like Spotify and Apple Music?
Iconic New York radio station 95.5 WPLJ will go off the air for good tomorrow night, leaving only hours to stream or call in before it transitions to entirely different content. The station launched back in 1971 as an album-oriented rock station, having persisted over the decades since into the hot adult contemporary destination it is today. That will change on 7PM ET on Friday, when the station's new owner flips the switch.
Even as 5G looms, losing the signal on your phone seems like a headache that will never quite go away. Now, though, a new antenna design could take wireless communications to previously radio dead spots, like underground or underwater, in tunnels, or simply spanning huge distances like national parks or deserts.
Samsung's future smartphones will have unlocked, activated FM radio chips, according to the company behind terrestrial radio mobile app NextRadio. According to TagStation, Samsung has confirmed that its future smartphones in the United States and Canada will have active FM chips, enabling handset owners to listen to their local radio stations. This follows the FCC's recent call for phone makers to support FM radio.
The FCC might want Apple to enable an FM radio in its iPhones so that they can be used during emergencies like the recent devastating hurricanes, but the Cupertino company has a good reason why that's not going to happen. FCC chairman Ajit Pai made his appeal earlier this week, insisting that "it is time for Apple to step up to the plate and put safety of the American people first." Unfortunately, it seems Pai didn't do his technical homework first.
Grace Digital already offers products that play nice with Chromecasts, but perhaps not at this level: its new radio, called the Mondo+, has a Chromecast built-in. Those of you who are familiar with the original Mondo will feel right at home here, as the Mondo+ doesn't offer too many aesthetic differences. Functionality is similar as well, but with a built-in Chromecast, your streaming options expand quite significantly.
There's no lack of streaming radio apps available for your smartphone, but one thing that is still mysteriously in short supply is access to FM radio. Most smartphones today have FM radio antennas built into them, but those antennas are only active in about half of smartphones here in the US. The FCC's new commissioner, Ajit Pai, would like to see that change.
A whole bunch of smartphones out on the market today have FM radio capabilities - but their owners don't know it. There's no real good reason for this lack of knowledge save the lack of advertising on the part of phone makers. FM Radio in a phone isn't currently a very sought-after feature, so - regardless of how often it's included in phones by default - it's just not spoken about. Today we're listing the whole lot of phone devices that can run FM Radio right out the box.
The days of FM radio are numbered, at least in Norway. Beginning later this week, Norway will begin switching off its FM radio network as it transitions to Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB). It's the first country to commit to such a change, though depending on how it goes, other countries may soon follow suit.
Things get ever smaller in the world of technology and while some things can get too small, like say notebooks or smartphones leaving them hard to use, other things can get so small it's hard to fathom the scale. Harvard scientists have created the world's smallest radio receiver and this little radio has parts that are built on an atomic scale. The receiver uses miniscule atomic-scale defects in pink diamonds.
The streaming music market is already a crowded one, but that isn't stopping iHeartRadio, the conglomerate behind over 800 US radio stations, from jumping in. With updates to both its iOS and Android apps this week, the service has debuted two new paid subscription plans that allow users to stream music on-demand, thanks in part to a new partnership with Napster.