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Product: Sirius S50
Price: $249.99 (Buy.com)
Rating: Average 6.9/10
Pros: Feature-packed, sleek design, simple setup
Cons: Not portable when streaming live content, confusing navigation, bulky when combined with car dock
Overall: A great device if you don’t need access to live programming on the go.

The Sirius S50 is a neat little device.  It essentially is a TiVo for your Sirius satellite radio.  I found the marketing a little confusing and can see how some might easily confuse it with a portable satellite radio… but it’s hardly portable (if you’re into live radio).  The device is really made for people that have long commutes to work, or primarily listen to music/ radio in their car.  In addition, it’s quite disappointing that the live radio can only be accessed in the car, due to the need of an antenna and satellite receiver.  When you take it out off of the car-dock (which it’s bundled with), you no longer are able to get a live feed. 

Read on for a breakdown of the Sirius S50 satellite radio.

Design - 6.5 - The S50 has a slick design to it.  The player itself is in the shape of a trapezoid (from the side), weighs just 6.5 ounces, and measures 1.9” x 3.9” x .7”.  Centered on the device is a 262,000 color TFT display.  The size is perfectly portable until you tack on the size of the car dock (which is 1.9” x 3.9”).  The buttons on the S50 are all on the side, leaving it with a black shiny finish on the front.  The buttons are pretty confusing since they decided not to use your traditional play, stop, and pause buttons.  When the device is in the car dock, you use the car dock’s wheel to control the radio station.  In addition to functioning as a wheel (similar to the volume button on your car stereo), it also moves like a joystick to make use of its other features.  The S50 car bundle comes standard with headphones, a belt clip, and a USB cable for connecting to a Windows 2000 or XP PC.  The S50 is light weight and small enough for your everyday use.

Setup - 7.5 - Setting up the S50 for radio listening is simple.  All you need to do is plug everything in, and it works.  The S50 sits in the car dock, the car dock has inputs/outputs for the antenna, audio, and power on the back of it.  The setup becomes a little bit more confusing when you install all of the car features that come with it.  I didn’t use the mounting accessories in my testing.  Since the device functions as an MP3 player as well, you can hook it up to your computer (if you want) and transfer some songs over.

Features - 8.0 - So lets say you’re driving or sitting in your house (using the home dock), and you hear a song that you want to record.  With the S50, all you have to do is press the heart icon and “Love” the song.  By using this TiVo-like method, you can save up to 50 hours of content.  The songs are then stored on your device by artist, title, or genre.  When you become obsessed with on of Sirius’ 120 channels, the S50 will automatically learn that channel and save it to your favorites.  This way you don’t have to use the wheel to toggle through 100 channels just to get to Howard Stern.  It will store your 3 favorite (most played) stations.  Also included are the following features:

• Game Alerts - Alerts you when your favorite teams are playing
• Sports Ticker - Get up to the minute score updates of your favorite teams without changing the channel
• 30 channel presets
• One touch JUMP to access traffic and weather reports for your city or use to tune to your favorite Sirius channel
• 6 hours battery life in portable mode - which is on the low-end for portable media players

If you’re looking for a device that doesn’t need to sit in a dock to get live content, you may want to check out some XM2Go devices which run on XM, not Sirius.

Usability - 6.0 - After spending some quality time with the S50 in my car, I never really got too in to it.  It may be because I had it sitting in my cup holder instead of on the included mount, but it was simply not easy enough to use.  The buttons on the side combined with even more buttons on the dock made it confusing to navigate and do what I wanted.  Although it looks great with all of the buttons on the side, it may have made it that much more confusing in the end.

So if you’re looking for a portable media player with a side of streaming satellite content, you should check out the Sirius S50 right away.

Editor’s note - The overall rating was calculated by weighting Design as 40%, Setup as 20%, Features as 20%, and Usability as 20%.

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