Recovering the Satellites

One of the biggest perks of my job is the diverse, constant exposure I get to new technologies, and new applications based on existing technologies. And in sorting through them, and hands-on evaluating those that rise to the top of the pile, I'm occasionally hit hard by an 'aha' moment; i.e. 'this is what the near future's going to look like….and it's cool'. It happened early last summer when I got my first taste of subscription music. And it happened yesterday, ironically once again with a music-based application.

I've written before about how much I enjoy my Sirius satellite radio subscription, both in my car and at my computer. Well, now I can add my cellphone to the list of playback sources. About a week ago I saw, on Smartphone Thoughts, that someone had developed a free application that enables Sirius channel content streaming to a Windows Mobile 2003SE- or Windows Mobile 5-based Smartphone over the phone's Internet data service. Well, I can happily report that it works as advertised! I installed the upgraded version on my Audiovox SMT5600 yesterday morning and tried it out (on both Rock channel 17, Jam_ON, and Electronic/Dance channel 33, Area 33) while walking the dogs around our neighborhood.

I encountered a few glitches; I had to have Windows Media Player already launched prior to running SiriusWM5, otherwise I'd get an 'insufficient memory to launch application' error message when I tried to connect to a channel, and I had to stop Windows Media Player playback prior to switching channels in SiriusWM5, otherwise the old channel's ASX stream would continue playing. But I was happily surprised by how rarely I encountered a 'buffering' pause, in spite of the sub-par GSM coverage in my neighborhood and the fact that I was tapping into the Internet via a low-bandwidth GPRS data service. And I continue to be amazed at the relatively hiqh quality of the 'stereo' Sirius streams, considering their miniscule 32 Kbps bitrates and the fact that they employ the 'ancient' WMA8 audio codec, not the more modern WMA codec variant that Verizon's leveraging.

So now I can not only use my SMT5600 to listen to ripped CDs I own, and to subscription-based music tracks, but also to 'live' subscription radio streams. Cool….sign up for a free three-day pass, if you're not already a Sirius subscriber, and check it out for yourself.

p.s….by the way, for those of you who didn't recognize the source of this blog post's title….