A few months ago, someone broke into my car and stole my Delphi Roady, which is a satellite radio receiver from XM Radio. I'm sure the radio was quickly converted into crystal meth, but the poor sap who ended up with what looked like a really cheap satellite radio was in for a shock: I'd called XM and had them cancel the subscription.
Of course the supply chain among traffickers of stolen goods doesn't include consumer warnings, so the final owner must have been surprised when the radio didn't work. Each radio has a unique identifier and if that identifier is reported stolen, it can be blocked forever from communicating with the satellite.
That satisfied my sense of revenge, but I was still out of radio.
The answer: Take it with you when you leave the car. Remove the magnet for the pharmaceutically challenged and other villains.
Internet Links
But what a nuisance.
They don't call it a Roady for nothing
Another factor in enjoying satellite radio on the road is the length of your daily commute. I live downtown, with a 25-minute commute. Certainly not enough time to justify dismantling the radio from its wires and moorings every time I get out of the car.
Others drive longer. On Sept. 7, the makers of Saturn cars staged a self-promotional rally to see which Toronto exurb has the longest time for a 60-km commute: Burlington, Newmarket or Whitby. Newmarket won with a commute that lasted one hour, 37 minutes and 21 seconds. People with commutes like that are more likely to enjoy the satellite broadcasts.
Long trips of several hundred kilometres are satellite-radio friendly too, unless one has good company. In a car one either talks or listens to the radio, but I find it difficult to do both. And that leaves the lonely traveller as the ideal customer.
But these drivers still have to remove the outboard radio when they arrive and when they get home (my car was burgled in my own carport, behind my house). And there's no guarantee that an in-dash system won't get stolen either.
I had a Sirius issue — suction
I replaced my XM Roady with a Sirius StarMate, fastened the suction cup to the windscreen and was ready to roll. But I soon tired of removing the radio every morning and night, and bought the home setup kit, which includes a metal stand, an AC power adapter and a separate antenna. I had to supply my own speakers.
The radio's been in the house pretty much since the spring.
My interest in satellite radio is strong. I tired of listening to MP3 files downloaded from Kazaa long before the industry shut the system down; I concluded that having my own library was very nice, but I still needed some surprises, and satellite radio promised me a range of music that keeps introducing me to new artists as well as old ones I'd forgotten. I get much more satisfaction from satellite radio than from my MP3 collection.
So a combination of radio and MP3 player sounds like a good idea, and XM's Inno, made by Pioneer Electronics, seeks to fill that gap.
Portable, good-looking and with a place to rest
The Inno is a sexy little box (5.5 cm by 9.5 cm, 1.5 cm thick), all black brushed chrome and glass, and the four simple controls on the front are outlined in a cool, soft blue-grey light that makes it easy to operate in the dark. It's about as big as an older iPod, meaning you can take it anywhere, and it's about as simple to operate. Full marks there. There's a stubby 2-cm antenna sticking out the top, and a connector for the included long antenna as well.
The Inno comes with a docking cradle, in which it sits sideways. Simply putting it there automatically rotates the screen to display the information properly. Remove it from the cradle, and the screen reverts to vertical orientation. (I would say landscape or portrait, but the screen is square: 4 cm on the diagonal.) It's a nice, bright screen, but not meant to be seen from farther away than what the earphone lines will allow.
And speaking of earphones, these are not the ear-bud types, which always pop out of my ears; instead, these fit into the ear canal, and are very comfortable and stay put. They can also blast your eardrums, given the Inno's power.
Parting a sea of music
The Inno has a 1-gigabyte memory, which is partitioned into two areas, half to store your MP3 and WMA music files and half for the stuff you record from the radio. (You can record a song after it has started; the Inno has a memory buffer for that.) The partition can be changed via included software, and it also allows you to add your own tracks.
When full, the Inno can store about 25 hours of music recorded from XM in a format called AACPlus, and about eight hours of MP3 and WMA tracks. Three times more playing time than MP3s suggests that AACPlus has a higher compression ratio than MP3, but XM is being very coy about the bit rate.
Sadly, the Inno has no way to increase the memory: No room for new memory cards. I expect future models will have more memory.
Some restrictions are disappointing
Oddly, while you can organize the unit's playlists on your computer, you can't on the Inno; conversely, you can't hear the files you've recorded from XM on your computer. The Inno will also play WMA files you bought on-line, but not subscription content, not even from Napster, with whom the Inno has a bundling agreement. You can thank the Byzantine demands of the music industry copyright lawyers for that puzzlement.
Now the two big questions: power and range.
Played continuously, the Inno will exhaust a full charge after about five hours, which isn't much. Good thing it comes with a dock, and you should park it there every night. Or you can buy an optional car attachment (into the cigarette lighter) and use the Inno's built-in FM antenna to broadcast the signal to an empty FM channel on your existing car radio.
Its signal range is quite good. The stubby built-in antenna is reasonably good outdoors (though next to useless indoors), depending on which city you're in and the height of the surrounding buildings (remember, XM prefers line-of-sight transmissions from satellites that are low on the Canadian horizon). Most of the time, in large cities where XM has built a lot of land-based signal-boosting "repeater" antennas, you should have no problem.
Despite a few shortcomings, Inno in nearly there
The unit has a couple of curious omissions, however. While you can bookmark a song while listening to XM radio (it shows up on your computer with a link to Napster to buy it), you can't skip backward in a song stream. The Inno uses buffered memory for other purposes, but not this one.
The Inno is, ultimately, a good product, but it falls just short of full maturity. More storage, more power and a few tweaks of the software, and it will be there.
And since it is designed to be carried all the time, you don't have to worry about being burgled. At almost $500, the Inno would be quite a loss.
1
