These are the latest apps, that will be departing my iPhone in the near future…
All but one are leaving because they are pretty much useless.
uSirius is leaving because it essentially doesn’t exist anymore, it was a great idea that got squashed by corporate stupidity…

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I guess I should add that the ones going away are TagReader, SeaDragon and MoodPhone

This is a major bummer

I remember back in the good old days, mergers usually resulted in a better company, and you took the BEST of both companies and kicked butt, by eliminating all the deadwood.

It seems that the rocket scientists over at SirusXM, have figured out how to screw that up beyond all recognition. First thing they did wrong is get rid of all the XM music programming, and keep the crappy redundant Sirius programming, seems like it is almost on a loop. Then they kept the crappy DJ’s (Here’s a hint cut the DJ’s and save money), if I want talk I’ll listen to Howard, and listening to Richard Blade’s wedding DJ gigs is getting old, kind sound like a commercial to me on a commercial free station…

So now comes the next blow, the apparent death of uSirius Starplayr, which looks like it officially ends the same day that you have to start paying for the Sirius internet feed in addition to your regular subscription. There is very little info coming out of the starplayr camp, but one rumor is that it is over the the apparent death of the iPhone app, and I am guessing a change to how things authenticate etc… There are rumors of a forthcoming SiriusXM iPhone app from SiriusXM, and that is the reason that uSirius Starplayr has not been approved. I have not seen anything regarding Rogue Amoeba’s Pulsar, but I’m willing to bet it is history as well…

uSirius StarPlayr, has/had a great interface, and is/was pretty rock solid form the start, and it will be missed. I can only hope that whatever the genius’s at SiriusXM come up with is half as good.

So now we come to Sirius stock SIRI, and yes I am an owner of this mess called a stock, and have a cost basis I think in the $2.70 range or about 20 time more then it is worth today.

I can only hope that the vast majority of Mel Karmazin, Scott Greentstein and the other rocket scientists running the show over there at Sirius is in stock , but I couldn’t find anything current… They’ll probably get a bazillion shares @ $0.14 and some how get it back to a dollar and be good to go for life…

So in closing, thanks Todd, Jason and the other guys, you did some pretty cool stuff, and I hope you had fun doing it…

Good luck…

Just got the preview loaded on my iPhone, and will mess around with it on my trip today, and report back later…

On an initial first look, it looks like they took care of the majority of feature requests and I assume the few minor bugs that existed…

The “Auto Tune” feature is a great addition, from app launch to playing last tuned station is about 17 seconds, and I’m showing about 3 bars of 3G coverage…

More to follow when I have time…

It is obvious to me that there is absolutely no drug testing going on at Sirius, for talent or management, maybe for the technical staff, because they seem to be the only ones that are doing anything right at sirius. 

I have been pummeled all freaking day with COMMERCIALS on commercial free Sirius, about the freaking superbowl coverage, 13 channels in 10 languages. 10 languages you have to be kidding me. So I wandered over to the sirius web site to find out what 10 languages were talking about here, so here is the breakdown.

• 4 Channels in English, 1 of those in the Queens english.
• 1 Channel in Spanish, understandable considering the number of spanish speaking NFL fans.
• 1 Channel in Russian, huh, how many Russian speaking sirus subscribers are there
• 1 Channel in French, same question??
• 1 Channel in Japanese, same question??
• 1 Channel in German, same question??
• 1 Channel in Italian, same question??
• 1 Channel in Mandarin Chinese, same question??
• 1 Channel in Hungarian say what, there are only 1.5 million hungarians in the US or one half of one percent of the US population
• And 1 Channel in Flemish W.T.F.

First things first, no offense to the flemish people.
I did the numbers here, and here is break down, and yes I did some creative math, because flemish is not a number the U.S. Census tracks, so I used Belgium, and since Flanders (Flemish people come from Flanders) occupies the Northern half of  Belgium, and the CIA factbook says so, I make the assumption that 58% of the belgium people speak flemish. According to the 2000 census there were 384,531 people of Belgian ancestry living in the U.S. and 58% of that is 223,028 people of Flemish ancestry. So we now figure in that roughly 6.7% of the U.S. population or 20Mil, are currently Sirius subscribers, gives us a total of 14,943 people in this country that are of Flemish ancestry and potentially Sirius subscribers, and I am guessing that the number of them that actually speak or understand Flemish is a lot lower then that, then how many of them are football fans, and will actually be listening to the game. My guess is somewhere around 5, 6 tops…

Looking at the numbers has brought another question, why Flemish, when there are twice as many Finnish people, and three times as many Czech, and there are more polish then Russian, French or Flemish…

It comes down to the issue, that a company in Sirius’ financial shape should not be spending any money, no matter how little it costs, and annoying subscribers in San Francisco or Seattle by preempting their traffic and weather to cover the Superbowl in Flemish, because I’m guessing that there are more people listening to traffic and weather in San Francisco and Seattle, then there will be Flemish people listening to the Superbowl