One of the ‘easter eggs’ hidden on the Nokia N800 was an FM radio receiver. The device shipped without any software to take advantage of the hardware, but the community came through with a solution to allow N800 owners to listen to FM radio through their device. While the Nokia N810 did not have the same little treasure, it appears as though the Nokia N900 does, and there’s already a solution to get it working!

Martin Grimme at Python and More has put together a package called n900-fmrx-enabler which enables the FM antenna when prompted, and then disables it again, to conserve battery. For right now, it’s no easy task, as the sound doesn’t immediately get output to the speakers, so Martin’s come up with a workaround. Unfortunately, this workaround sucks down the battery quite quickly.

If you’re feeling rather daring, you can install fmradio from the extras-testing repository, to give it a go. Is FM radio something you would use often, or do you think it’s rather silly, given the local storage and 3G connectivity that the N900 has?

(Image is from atmasphere.net a