Sirius S50 Satellite Radio

March 2006

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