Sirius, XM trade blows via release of portable players
When comparing satellite radio providers, there’s a lot to consider. Programming, price, affiliates and partners, and promotions to name a few. But there’s another big consideration to be made as well, the receivers/players available from each company. Historically, XM has always been ahead of Sirius in this regard, offering products with superior features and giving customers more choices, allowing them to purchase the right reciever, or recievers, for them.
One area in which Sirius has had no answer to XM in the past has been a portable player. Sirius never released a portable reciever, saying that walls and buildings would make reception too poor. XM went ahead anyway, releasing the MyFi earlier this year, increasing the technology edge that XM had and has over Sirius.
Sirius aims to remedy this, however, with the debut of the Sirius S50. Although billed as a radio, the S50 is actually far from it, seeing as how Sirius steadfastly refuses to release a portable reciever. The S50 does not recieve Sirius broadcasts on the go. But what it does do is seriously (pun intended) cool. When attached to a docking station (car station included, home station available at $100), it can record up to 50 hours of Sirius programming. The S50 is also compatable with other mp3s, making it a portable mp3 player. Sirius subscribers can hold any combination of Sirius progamming and their personal mp3s on the S50, taking it with them any where they go, saving their favorite programs (such as the soon-to-be-launched Howard Stern channel) for later use, and mixing Sirius content with personal mp3 playlists.
The cool look of the S50 is made to appeal to fans of the aforementioned Stern, as well as tech savvy Sirius subscribers.
Not to be outdone, XM has announced its own portable player. And, as par for the course, it actually outshines Sirius’s S50 in several ways. The most obvious is design. XM’s “Samsung neXus” is smaller than the S50 (3.4 inches tall, 1.9 inches wide and 0.7 inches deep). It’s also sleeker, and a bit more stylish, more closely mimicking the more popular, minimalist portable mp3 players available. But the differances don’t end there. Although both players store up to 50 hours of music, the Samsung neXus has the extra feature of letting users flag songs they here on XM to purchase on Napster. This cool and useful feature shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to followers of SateLink. As we reported in July, XM and Napster are teaming up to offer a service called XM+Napster that brilliantly cross promotes both companies and offers download services through XM.
Both the Sirius and XM players should appeal to early adopters and satellite radio nuts, but more cautious consumers (like me) will be waiting for the upgraded version that recieves live satellite broadcasts and allows imediate wireless downloads from anywhere in America.
October 6th, 2005 at 3:24 pm
[...] Broadcasting premium, commercial-free music is one thing, but making it easy to record and take anywhere? Well, that just may be too much for the recording industry to swallow. According to an RIAA spokesman, Sirius’s new S50 portable radio recorder and XM’s doppelganger “neXus” may be grounds for a law suit: Illegal song trading has been blamed by the record industry for declines in sales, and labels have become increasingly aggressive in their legal battles to defend their product. Now that focus includes portable players. [...]