Sign up for the FREE Tell Membership and receive benefits that include the digital edition of Tell Magazine sent straight to your inbox, product giveaways, coupons and much more!
Sign up for the FREE Tell Membership and receive benefits that include the digital edition of Tell Magazine sent straight to your inbox, product giveaways, coupons and much more!
Pocketable and Sort-of Portable
In race to be the most innovative satellite radio company, Sirius presently takes the lead with its S50 product—a device that combines a plug-and-play satellite radio with a flash-based MP3 player. The big appeal of the S50 (and XM’s Helix and Inno appearing later this year) is that you don’t have to choose between owning a satellite radio or an MP3 player, plus you can record satellite radio content and take that with you as well. The S50 is about the size of an iPod Mini, a little smaller really, and it’s got one of the best color displays of any portable player. In the box you get an install kit for the car. If you want to use it at home, that takes a separate $99 home kit.
Using the S50 simply as a satellite radio is fairly simple, as most satellite radios are these days. The car unit comes with a mounting apparatus that you’ll love or hate. In my car, it fits well and didn’t get in the way of anything, but some dash designs may give you trouble. The S50 grabs space-based stations quickly and locks on well. You can beam the music from the S50 to your car’s stereo via the built-in FM transmitter, which also worked well. To make sure your eyes stay on the road while you’re changing channels, a little voice lets you know what channel you’re on as you turn the dial. Since there are no numbered buttons, finding your pre-set favorites isn’t as simple as other satellite radios. You have to press the Find button, then turn the dial to find your preset stations, then press the dial in to tune to it. Note, that this is a satellite radio only when it’s docked in either the car or home kit. It doesn’t tune in live content when you tote it around town in your pocket. For that ability you’ll need to look to the XM2go models.
If you want your music on-the-go, the S50 lets you record up to 50 hours of Sirius content. You can schedule up to 20 two-hour recordings or press the record button (which unfortunately is a heart—because you just love the music) to record individual tracks as you hear them. When listening to live programming the S50 provides about a 30 minute memory buffer so you won’t miss the beginning of a song. You can’t just press the record button to save a whole day’s worth of music, however. Each recording session is limited to two hours, and to schedule recordings you need go into the setup menu and navigate your way to the content management section—a process that you’ll have to do several times before you remember the sequence.
As an MP3 player, the S50 is not as smooth as the best dedicated players, but it’s pretty good. The Sirius software used for loading up songs is straightforward and allows you to drag your music onto the player without confusing menus and hang-ups. Finding your songs on the player is pretty simple, though a bit limited in my view. You can search for tracks, artists and genres, but you can’t just have the player shuffle everything in its memory. With only 1GB of memory, and half of that saved for Sirius recordings, it seems silly to have no global control over your entire collection. You can create a master playlist to achieve the same goal, but that’s too much work for me.
Despite some pretty awkward earbuds (it’s very difficult to find the L and R marks), the S50 sounds great. When away from a dock, navigating through your Sirius recordings and MP3 transfers can be cumbersome—after a week of use I still hadn’t completely gotten the hang of it. I particularly wish the recorded Sirius shows displayed the date and time of the recording, rather than just the length and the channel ID—that way you’d easily be able to tell your Wednesday night recording of Alt Nation from your Thursday night recording. Also, the battery life is a bit short, lasting around five hours on a charge. That makes it fine for my daily train commute, but barely enough for a flight to LA.
The S50 is the coolest radio Sirius has come out with yet, and will give die-hard Howard Stern fans something more to cheer about. —Grant Clauser
Sirius S50
$330
$12.95/month
Plug-and-play satellite radio
50 hours of recording time
MP3 playback
Color display
Car kit included
5-6 hour rechargeable battery
FM Transmitter
www.siriusradio.com
Related Posts