LG offers digital radio on your phone...if that's what you were looking for
Been desperately waiting for a phone that had a digital radio built in? Neither have we, but that hasn't stopped LG from delivering the LG Stylus DAB+.
It's not the most obvious marriage, a digital radio receiver and a mobile phone, but LG are willing have a go at getting it to work. The LG Stylus DAB+ is, according to LG, the first DAB+ enabled phone and who are we to argue?
Digital Audio Broadcasting is basically a type of digital radio with some fancy features, offering better quality than FM and with the ability to send track and station information along with the audio -- even images. It's been operating in Australia for a good five years now along with around 40 other countries, including the UK, but not in the US, where it's HD Radio instead.
The Stylus DAB+ has just been launched in Paris, at the Radiodays Europe 2016 radio conference, and it's a collaboration between LG and the global body that represents radio broadcasters, the wonderfully named IDAG. That's the International DMB Advancement Group if you were wondering. DMB, if you were still wondering, is digital multimedia broadcasting (and that's why you shouldn't have an abbreviation in your name if you want to make an acronym out of it).
The new phone is almost identical to the recently announced LG Stylus 2, with slightly more RAM being the only obvious difference, apart from the DAB+ receiver. The Stylus 2 has some nice pen-based features and is expected to come with a fairly reasonable price tag. The two even come in the same colours: white, silver and brown.
Features
- 5.7-inch display with 1,280x720-pixel resolution
- 155 by 79.6 by 7.4mm; 145 grams (6.1 by 3.1 by 0.3 inches; 5.1 ounces)
- 1.2GHz quad-core processor
- Rear 13-megapixel camera, 8-megapixel front
- 2GB RAM
- 16GB storage with microSD
- 3,000mAh battery
- Android 6.0 Marshmallow
LG and partners are quick to point out that digital radio has a lot of specialist stations and listening to it won't use any of your data limit. But while this would definitely be a nice feature to have in a mid-range phone, it's not clear if people will be going out of their way to buy this over any other phone costing about the same.