Nokia N9 has FM radio and FM Transmitter on board

The Nokia N9 is the first MeeGo handset to launch out of the Finnish giant and it seems the world just can't get enough of it. Today we have some great news for you - despite Nokia's claims, the N9 has an FM radio receiver and an FM Transmitter in its premium-quality plastic body.

So while the Nokia N9 specs sheet claims that the smartphone has no FM radio, let alone FM transmitter the hardware is actually there. That was confirmed by no other than Nokia itself on one of its developer websites.

However, there's no software support for either of those and the Finns chose not to include it in the N9 specs sheet so no one got confused. Plus the FM transmitter might turn out to be totally unusable.

Yet, we are confident that the software issues will be dealt with eventually and the N9 will be getting FM radio functionality. The developer website says that it's not possible to control the receiver using Qt Mobility API (you know, the framework Nokia uses to let devs create apps compatible with several different platforms) so we'd need a native app, but that shouldn't be that much of a problem, really.

Now the discouraging part of this is a line on the same website saying that "there isn't a way for the phone to access the transmitter as the device hasn't got a transmission antenna". Now we are not 100% sure, but we but we suspect that the transmitter only has a controlling chip and no antenna, which might make enabling it impossible.

On the other hand adding a piece of hardware to a smartphone's chipset that it completely useless is just a waste of money and Nokia isn't exactly in a position where it can throw money down the drain.

Whatever happens we'll at least get the FM radio, right?

Thanks, cloud for sending this in!

Source 1 | Source 2