The N900 features a FM Transmitter that allows you to play the audio on your device wirelessly to any FM radio, this is especially useful in the car. Unfortunately, there are occasions when the FM transmitter’s performance leaves you wanting and the static in the transmissions renders it worthless.

This happens when the power level of the transmitter drops, such behavior is also triggered when you plug the charger while using it. Fortunately, there is a patch that can fix this and help improve the performance considerably. To download the patch you will need to enable the Extras-Devel repository on your N900. Once you have, simply refresh the Application Manager and look under the ‘System‘ head for ‘fm-boost‘. Simply install it as you would any other application.

From now on, whenever you use the FM transmitter on your N900, run this patch from the Menu and it will jack up the power level to 118, thus improving the transmitter’s performance. Nokia will possibly fix this bug in the upcoming firmware, but till then if you feel the transmitter on your device is not upto it, try using this patch.

I really hope Nokia maximizes the potential of the N900’s transmitter as it is something which is exceedingly useful, but often rendered worthless due to poor performance. Nokia, please do not make a compromise because running it at higher level would eat battery life, just jack it up to the maximum level that the law and hardware can take. If necessary, let users manually control power settings.