T-Mobile CEO John Legere announced on Twitter that the company will “push” its phone manufacturers partners to include and enable FM radio features on T-Mobile phones.
The move comes two weeks after AT&T announced a similar initiative. Most phones include some FM radio circuitry in the main chipset, but may not include all of the necessary connections to enable the feature.
It is considered a relatively cheap and easy feature to include. Most phones with the feature use the cord of connected wired headphones as the FM radio antenna. The makers of the third-party FM radio app NextRadio have been campaigning recently for more phones to include the necessary hardware support.
FM radio uses less battery and data than streaming music services, and of course the broadcasts are free to anyone in range.
