If you've been waiting for official FM radio support in your Nexus One - and I know there are hundreds of you, then you will have to keep waiting, possibly forever.

One thing is certain - the official Nexus One Froyo release will not include FM radio support, told me one of the core Android engineers at the Google I/O conference a couple of days ago.

I went to Android Office Hours where everyone had a chance to ask core developers anything they wanted (I managed to grab 2 Android dev books there too - awesome!). I was told that Google and HTC selected a chip that fit their needs, and it happened to support FM radio and Wireless N.

While the Android team realizes that support is possible and is highly requested by the users, adding it is so far down the priority list that it may simply never happen, and definitely not in Froyo.

The details are fuzzy now but I am 90% confident the developer mentioned that 802.11n support will not be added in the official Froyo either, for similar reasons - lack of developer resources.

Glimmer Of Hope

There is a glimmer of hope though, and this made me feel proud of being part of the Android community.

After I asked the questions and received nay responses on both fronts, the Android core developer - by the way, his name was Brian Swetland - said that it was now up to the community to work out a solution and named Cyanogen as an example.

Cyanogen already baked 802.11n support into his CyanogenMod ROM, and is now looking into potential FM radio support. A few weeks ago, Broadcom committed drivers for 802.11n into the AOSP (Android open source project) public code repository, which Cyanogen promptly ripped out and incorporated into CyanogenMod.

The radio situation is more complicated because nobody wrote a driver for it yet, or at least released it publicly. I suggested to Brian that since the Droid Incredible kernel source was released a few days ago by HTC, and the Incredible supports FM radio and runs on the same chipset, that it may be possible to rip the drivers and software out of it and port to Nexus One. Brian could not confirm that this would work but didn't deny that it wouldn't either. I pinged Cyanogen about this, and it remains to be seen if he can make this all work.

How beautiful is this? Google doesn't have enough dev bandwidth, so they suggest and actually approve the community rolling their own solution in a custom ROM, thus acknowledging and approving of rooting.

Can you imagine Apple do anything remotely similar? Again, I am damn proud to be an Android supporter.