Samsung to Team Up with XM Radio

By: Grahm Skee on July 26, 2005 9:19 PM

Samsung’s two new MP3 players will feature XM Radio, sort of. The player will not be able to receive XM broadcast directly but will instead dock to an XM base allowing the user to download certain broadcasts. It will also allow you to identify and purchase songs easily through their online music service. (...just incase you are too lazy to read the screen) The two new players will be flash based, moving to deemphasize the mini drive player to concentrate on flash based players.

My guess is that one of them will be the Samsung YP-T8 that we covered earlier. It’s hard to tell what the service will be exactly and how much it will cost, but to me it sounds like just another music service along with a pay version of the podcast. I don’t see this becoming anything substantial. Now if they were to add XM receiver to the MP3 player and allow XM recording and time shifting, then you have a product that people will be willing to buy. However, I doubt it will ever happen. XM pulled the PCR, a USB XM radio that could record XM programming, from the market sometime ago due to kids recording and archiving terabytes of boybands and top 40 divas.

[AP & ZDnet]

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