Sirius S50 Satellite Radio/MP3 Player (Internal Hard Drive, 6 Hours)

Reviewed by: Proxcause

Duration of ownership: 10 Months

Strengths: This unit has been disappointing. While I have been a Sirius listener from the beginning, this is the first unit I have direct from Sirius. Frankly I am concerned that Sirius is growning like topsy with poor attention to detail in sale and support of Sirius Branded Equipment. When I purchased this unit there were problems that required an upgrade in firmware. My original unit fried like other reviewers have described. It took months to obtain a replacement. I have both the docking station for the car and the home stand. Now that a true portable model is out, in less then 12 months that truly does what this unit was represented to do, I feel a bit ripped off. This unit (SR50) came to market too fast without enough testing. I certainly recommend that sirius purchasers take a wait and see attitude before rushing to buy new Sirius branded equipment over the larger less expensive units which are stable war horses.

Weaknesses: read above

Overall: Too quirky, too fragile, poor customer support. Sirius brought this unit to market without enough pre-sale bench testing. But I love Howard.

Reviewed by: 2douche

Strengths: Record songs with a click of a buttonGreat programming

Overall: The programming on Sirius is generally good, and the S50 lets you save good songs just by hitting a button - saves the artist and song title into a list so after you save a few it's like an mp3 player, too. I mostly use this to listen to Howard Stern. I debated spending this much on a radio but I think it's worth it to have the record function, and the Sirius subscription fee is definitely worth it, too.

Reviewed by: parokyae

Strengths: Sleek, portable & compact design (MP3 player), bright TFT color screen, built-in hard drive.

Weaknesses: Inability to receive live satellite radio broadcast when not in the docking station, body easily scratches.

Overall: Overall, I liked the designed & functionality of this unit. Sound quality is good using the FM transmitter. I also rarely encounter any signal interruptions using the car kit antenna. I wish the hard drive capacity could have been bigger.

Reviewed by: rmerikle

Strengths: Great all in one product. Satellite radio, MP3 player and radio Tivo all built into one. This was designed to be a primary car/home product with the ability to go mobile.

Weaknesses: Still has some kinks to work out. Trys to do to many things and does none of them perfect.

Overall: Unlike a lot of users I personally love my S50. I have been using it for about two weeks now and it fits my needs perfectly. My routine is as follows: Put the S50 in the car at night and since I live on the West Coast it tapes Howard from 3AM to 7AM, so when I leave for work in the morning I have the entire Howard show at my disposal. I listen to Howard as I drive to the Park and Ride and then pop the S50 out and continue listening on my bus ride into downtown. I do the same on my return trip home. I hope to improve this by adding a home base station once production catches up with demand. In regards to music. I look at this in a similar fashion to Tivo. I hardly ever watch live TV with Tivo and I am finding I hardly ever listen to live radio with the S50. Why you ask? Because I can first upload over 500 Megs of my own MP3?s to the S50 and then when I do listen to live radio I can hit the ?love? button and it will record the song to another 500 Megs of memory. So right now I have over 150 songs on my S50 and when I am traveling with it outside of my car I just listen to the MP3?s on shuffle. No it is not an Ipod that you can store some 6 Billion songs on, but who really needs that many songs anyway? On top of that when you are in the car it records what it thinks are your three favorite music channels. I would say I have at least another couple of hours worth of queued music channels on the S50 that I am able to listen to. This is great because I can fast forward through want I don?t want to listen to and can ?love? the songs I want to keep for later. I can also hit pause when I run into the store. If you have a Tivo you will understand how nice it is to be able to pause and listen when you want. And lets not forget that you can always listen to live radio. I live in Seattle and I get satellite as well as terrestrial (old school antenna broadcast) Sirius feeds. Yes there are some dead spots here and there, but overall it has been quite minimal. I notice that the quality of FM reception is just poor compared to the Sirius sound quality and I use the built in FM Transponder which works much better then I expect. Yes it has its limitations. The software is probably the biggest problem, but I am sure they will continue to upgrade that or better yet I am sure someone will figure out how to hack it. Please do not buy this if you are intending to go mobile with it more of the time then you have it in a home docking station or in a car. It was just not designed that way. And yes getting activated was tough. The satalite needs to send the receiver a signal. Go for a long drive and then call to get activated. Worked like a charm.

Reviewed by: rose888

Strengths: good color screen, portable mp3 player

Weaknesses: must be rebooted when signal is lost,connection to docking station not very secure

Overall: I purchased this player for xmas and I liked the fact that it was a portable mp3player, the fact that it did not receive live radio was not a concern, I would just listen to a reordered program. The only issue I have w/this unit is when you are listening to the radio and you start up the car, it might need to be rebooted; in this case you have to take the battery out and reset it. It's a hassle. Also, the connection to the docking station is not that secure, so the unit will turn itself off. I'm going to purchase the extended warranty, that way when the bugs are worked out I can exchange it for a new unit. As far as the home docking station, I went to Radio shack and purchased the DC to AC converter ($30) and it works just fine in my home. Overall I do like this unit and will keep it; I'm just hope that Sirius gets enough returned units and complaints to fix all the bugs.

Reviewed by: oldnoheart

Strengths: mp3 uploads very nice

Weaknesses: cant get a radio signal with 7 tries they say wait 1 hour to recive a signal who sit in the car that long

Overall: i just want to hear what i have paid for i have tried to connect but i only have the weather channel to listen to this may be allright for the weather man but i want to hear my sport channel some jazz and blues and mabey some old r and b but to tell me after i have purchased the air time they are having a problem with the uplink i feel used