S50 (1 Viewer)

[Michael_Victor]

My wife preordered Sirius S50, thinking it was a portable satellite radio and I was reading up on it. It doesn’t seem to be the case, it seems to be similar to an IPod, pooling music when you are at your radio in either your vehicle or home then storing it. Doesn’t seem to receive signal itself. Don’t understand why it has a screen unless it downloads from certain websites. Anyone have incite on this. Thanks!

 

[Ernie Estrella]

It's like a Tivo/MP3 Player but it still needs to be docked into a station, home or car to recieve a live signal. You'll need the home dock in order to program it to record what you want through out the day/night. Then you can take it off the dock and use it like an Ipod with up to 50 hours of content. But again, the part that comes off is not a receiver by itself.

 

[Jeff Gatie]

Please note that without a strong terrestrial signal, no current "portable" players are truly live portables. The XM offerings are good in places, awful in others.

How the S50 gets around this is it lets you save songs (by pressing a button) and/or record shows via schedule recordings or on the fly. It also automatically records your 3 favorite (most listened to) music channels, allowing you to save songs from the recordings later. It also is an MP3 player, letting you download mp3/WMA files via the included software. You then remove the "player" portion from the dock and use that as your portable.



The S50 has the capability for firmware and screen logo/voice menu/wallpaper updates via the Sirius website, so yes it can download. The full color screen is just a nicer version of the 2-3 line information screen you see on most satellite radios. It displays the channel name, the show/song name and any scroll information (artist etc.) that may be on. Each genre has an appropriate wall paper and each channel has a voice menu for easy navigation.

Note: Early units can be described as buggy, but a 1.3 version of the firmware is going to be released by the 20th which claims to fix a major portion of the bugs and also add enhancements.

 

[PatWahlquist]

The new XM portables unveiled at CES have similar displays as the S50's.

Sirius did a chat over at SiriusBackstage and they said there will be a portable unit sometime this year. Whether or not there will also be an add on to the S50 to make it portable (such as an outboard antenna) remains to be seen.

I had an S50 up until this past week when it was stolen out of my truck along with some other stuff. It is very buggy, and I'm not sure firmware upgrades can even fix these bugs.