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Comment by blang | Hacker News Reader

I actually used a Walkman couple months back. I was traveling by bus during a baseball game and wanted to listen to the play by play, which was on an AM station. Good thing I had my circa 1990 Walkman with AM tuner collecting dust in the back of a closet. Worked like a charm.

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Lots of MP3 players lately have FM tuners included. It's pretty head-scratching that Apple omitted radio from the iPod line.

Yeah, the fact that most mobile devices these days lack radio functionality is something that's always baffled me, especially now that some phones are being equipped with TV tuners.

I think the thing is that a lot of the media has turned to on-demand through DVRs, hulu.com, podcasts, etc. Also, there's probably a part where FM tuners don't sound new enough for it to be worth being included. Kind of like having an iPhone with new telegraph functionality!

I was very upset when my iriver h140 stopped working it wasn't much more bulky than an ipod and had radio, ogg and flac compatibility and I could use it to record tapes and records with its optical line in something no other player on the market at this time had done and to this time I don't know if anything has changed.

The experience of listening to FM radio on a portable radio with a small aerial, is not good.

I tried once, with my then phone's FM radio, to listen to my usual BBC station on my 25 minute commute train journey. I gave up (too many tunnels, bridges, cuttings, with poor or no signal), and went back to my MP3s. I certainly wouldn't want to try TV!

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