XM radio: Portable receiver from Pioneer

Pioneer comes with a great way to bring XM radio to your car. The Inno is a XM satellite radio receiver with the size of an iPod and features a capture button that lets you record the current song, an MP3 player, compact battery power and an integrated antenna.

As with other removable satellite-radio receivers for the car, you slip the Inno in its cradle and tune your car radio to line-in or an unused FM station, and you've got music. What's magical about the Inno is that when you hear a song you like, pressing the middle button of the rocker pad three times records the whole song. You also can record a music stream.


Thanks to an always-recording onboard memory cache, the Inno can capture back to the beginning of the song, even if you request a recording after it starts. Unlike some earlier recording satellite-radio receivers, the Inno knows to stop at the end of the song and doesn't lose music from volatile RAM when you power off or switch channels. You can then categorize your music or create a playlist.

The Inno has 1GB of onboard memory, split equally between the satellite-radio cache and an MP3 player: It'll hold about 25 hours of captured XM music and 8 hours of MP3 or WMA files (satellite radio is more compressed than 128-Kbps MP3). You can also reset the cache divider to hold only XM recordings; just be warned that you'll lose all your previously recorded music if you do so. 4GB would have been more useful, but with flash memory at $50 a gigabyte, that would have pushed the Inno's already steep $400 list price well over $500.

The color 1.7-inch display reorients itself from vertical to horizontal when it's in the docking module. We found the default use of stylized logos for each XM channel made the display hard to read in daylight. Also, the buttons on the included remote were a bit small. On the plus side: In case you plug into a 12-volt outlet that's always on, a setup option lets you time out XM after 60 or 180 minutes of no activity, so you won't run down the battery. The Inno also streams stock quotes and sports scores.

Related news: Foursprung, P4MR, XM radio

Source: Technoride

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