uSirius Starplayr for the iPhone…

It has been a hectic week, so I am a little late on posting this…

As much as I enjoy(ed) starplayr2, I am enjoying the iPhone version so much more.

Going to start off with what’s wrong with it, at least what’s wrong that can be changed. This is a fairly short list, and most of my issues appear to be under consideration from what has been posted in the forums…

  1. Volume control is in a bad place, between the channel up down buttons, I have accidentally changed the channel more then a few times, and since the forum post to request the change is one of the developers, I guess this one will be addressed…
  2. Shake to shuffle, needs an on off switch, or what I saw suggested in the forum an “Off, Shuffle Favorite Channels, Shuffle All”. Had it change channels on me a couple times when setting my iPhone down. I am not really feeling the shake to shuffle here, since it takes several seconds to stream the new station, it kind of takes the spontaneity out of it, like the instant action like on something like UrbanSpoon or itunes.
  3. Background play, I know that it cant play in the background out of the application, but it would be nice if it would continue to play while I am looking through the station list and such.
  4. Play last channel on launch, sort of related to #3 above, my now second favorite iPhone audio app Pandora does it, and when I launch an audio app I want to hear audio.

And thats about all I see wrong with it, and it is still a beta…

The setup was about as simple as you can get, select your service, enter your username and password, and hit Done, thats it. Then all you need to do is pick your channel in 1 of 4 ways, Scroll through All Channels, Genres, Presets, or Search, and after a few second of buffer building you’ll start hearing your audio selection.

I have been trying my best to put uSirius Starplayr through its paces in various scenarios. I Have had it running on all 3 modes Edge, 3G and WiFi all are fully functional, and even using edge in the middle of a large hospital(will explain that in another post) with real bad signal (barely 2 bars edge) I had maybe 2 or 3 dropouts over a 3 plus hour session, and even the battery consumption was not that big of an issue. Tried it on the road in varying levels of coverage, and had one issue of  the application crashing, restarted the app, and it picked right back up.

Since I have yet to  be impressed with any of the “Portable” hand held satellite receivers  from either XM or Sirius, this is a great alternative to those devices, and means one less thing to carry and charge. Then you also need to take into account that the Stiletto software does not support OS X, and lets not forget those stylish Antenna Headphones.

Stylish Headphone Antenna
Stylish Headphone Antenna

The only downside that really cant be addressed by anyone other then at&t,  is the same with any of the iPhones network based applications, no service, no data, no workee. Since I live in rural Southeast Virginia, and spend a fair amount of my free time out in even more rural Virginia, it is a fairly rare occasion that I am not in any coverage and unable to use data services, so that has not really become a factor. Since I am usually horribly lost at that point and only paying attention to my GPS not and not anything else…

All in all this is a great, really great application and lives on the front/main page of my iPhone. 

Here are the obligatory screen shots.


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One response to “uSirius Starplayr for the iPhone…”

  1. admin Avatar
    admin

    I had an experience today, that drove home another reason why I love this application, tunnels. Traffic was messed up in the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel today, and it took 15 to 20 minutes to make it through. No sat signal in the tunnel, but there is 3G and EDGE… 🙂
    Since I got XM with my truck, I pretty much have refused to listen to terrestrial radio, except when I am forced, another reason to dislike trips to the dentist.

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