Product Review: Pioneer Inno Portable XM Radio

With the launch of the Sirius S50 a few months ago, the satellite radio portable wars began. The S50, which combined Sirius content with your own MP3s, is a cool product, but XM has trumped it with their latest XM2Go products.

XM2Go, the company’s portable satellite radio platform, was launched late 2004 in the form of the Delphi MyFi that received XM radio on-the-go and allowed five hours of recording. The new lineup improves on the function and design of the product, and adds MP3/WMA support. We got a hold of Pioneer’s Inno XM2Go product, but the Samsung Helix is functionally identical, and cosmetically pretty close too.

The Inno (or Helix), a hair larger than Motorola’s RAZR cell phone, sports a color LCD screen (larger than the screen on the S50), 1GB of storage for 50 hours of XM radio recording (or a mixed amount of XM and MP3s), a built-in antenna for listening when you’re out and about, and very intuitive user controls. It ships with a cradle for charging and connecting to your home stereo. A car kit is sold separately (in the original XM2Go, the car and home cradles were both included).