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A complaint I’ve seen about the Sony Ericsson Xperia X2 and the Google Nexus One is that neither phone comes with a radio. The problem is that no one really cares.
Manufacturers still cram as many features into their gadgets as possible, especially if it helps makes the premium price of high-end devices more palatable. But now that makers are learning from their first several attempts at capturing the kitchen-sink market—a group that’s willing to pay good money for a phone—they (at least Google and Sony Ericsson) have decided that it’s not really worth engineering radio hardware into their future devices.
I love my Nokia N97 because it can do anything, and yes, it’s also radio. But I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve used that feature, since I started using the phone. If I’m the norm, then it’s reasonable to assume that many others rarely use their phone’s built-in radios as well, right? Especially when we can buy the songs we want, sort them into playlists, and hear the music we want, when we want it?
I’m assuming both HTC/Google and Sony Ericsson have some pretty solid market research to back-up this decision, and that the general lack of uproar over the “missing” feature validates this. But what about you, dear readers? For those who have radios integrated into their phones, how often have you used them? Be honest!
