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" Something odd has happened recently in my music-listening life. Two weeks ago I received the new fifth-generation iPod Nano. Since then, my once-rigid playlist of personal standards has suddenly been infiltrated by daily doses of NPR, college radio and the occasional classic rock riff. Yes, Apple has pushed me back into FM radio. I remember well purchasing my first MP3 player a decade ago--it was a five-song, 32 MB-capacity Rio Diamond. This player hooked me on the on-demand programming of portable MP3 players. And without an FM tuner (a feature that has been absent from every one of my MP3 players over the years), this player catalyzed a decade-long hiatus on most of my FM radio listening. The latest Nano is the first Apple MP3 player to ever include an FM tuner (despite the fact that most non-Apple MP3 players built in the past decade have a radio tuner). And it turns out this device is a great reintroduction to the FM world. It has a TiVo-like buffering system that automatically backs up 15 minutes of programming, allowing you to pause live radio for bathroom breaks or phone calls (although you can&amp;#039;t save the feed.) It is also extraordinarily easy to use, although some users may not appreciate its inability to work without headphones plugged in (the player uses them as a slide-in antenna). Of course, this is only surprising because it comes from Apple--a company that has done a bang-up job of shielding iPod devotees from the terrors of the FM dial. Without a radio tuner, the iPod plays no ads, no obnoxious DJs, and only songs that, by virtue of you loading them onto your player, you are likely to love (or at least have loved at one point). The lack of a radio tuner quite simply fits with the Apple mentality. For a company that thrives on iron-fisted control, radio waves must have seemed chaotic and uncontrollable. Their sound quality is often ruined by static. Their programming is sometimes offensive to taste. In these regards, terrestrial radio is inferior to satellite radio, Internet radio and virtually any other method of listening to music. But there&amp;#039;s something inimitable and raw about radio. The way it fades into static as you drive out of a city or go too deep into a subway tunnel. The unyielding perkiness found in over-caffeinated morning-show hosts. The exceedingly obvious playlists compiled by classic rock stations. The way college radio DJs (of whom I was once one) punctuate every other word with an &amp;quot;uhhh&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;you know.&amp;quot; This nostalgia is only bolstered by the fact that, for many of us, the radio was our first introduction to music. For others, constructing a crystal radio kit was a DIY rite of passage. Sure, it&amp;#039;s middle-of-the-road stuff, but it&amp;#039;s also a distinct sort of fun that can&amp;#039;t be replicated by self-programmed playlists--or even the niche programming of satellite radio Radio has another important thing going for it. In an era of mounting monthly bills, radio is one of the last truly free forms of media. Radios themselves are very cheap, and they require no subscriptions or fees of any sort.  Will the new Nano&amp;#039;s radio provide a significant boost in Arbitron ratings? Maybe not, but I wouldn&amp;#039;t be surprised if it helps introduce a new generation--and reintroduce an old one--to FM radio&amp;#039;s unique listening format. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/reviews/a4654/4331539/>