Although the Sirius XM iPhone App is missing Howard Stern and a few other important channels I still think it’s a decent app.
So far after using it I have not experienced any crashes or stability issues.
When you first start the application you are prompted to sign in to your Sirius/XM account, you must have a Premium Online Subscription to use this Application, if you want a free 7 day trial visit this link.
After signing into the app you will be presented with a loading screen while the app downloads the initial content (stations, images) it says it will take up to one minute to download and it took a little under that to finish.
After that screen you are then taken to the categories section where you can browse for stations by Genre. Nothing much to this screen.
Clicking on a category will bring you to the Channels section where you can browse individual channels. I think this part is much nicer and easier to navigate and really makes the Categories sections useless. I did notice at times that browsing the Channel section was a little slow.
Channel section is above. Clicking on a channel will start playing that station. Clicking on the blue arrow will take you to the station description page.
From here you can click play now to listen to the station.
At any time if you want to add a station as a favorite or purchase a track you hear just press the area I have marked in Red above. The favorites is really cool but the ability to Buy a track in iTunes directly from your phone is a really great feature. Also while in your favorite section all you need to do is click on the station and it starts playing this is great for anyone that only has certain stations they listen to and don’t want to bother messing with searching around.
Clicking on the arrow will bring up the station logo, I assume in the future there will be more things to see here but right now it’s plain. I’m assuming album artwork or other interactive media will be included soon.
Buying a track in the app is really simple. You can buy now or Add the song to your shopping cart. I really like that.
Here is the song in my shopping cart.
So the app has only been out for a few hours and minus a few missing stations I’m liking what I see so far. Hopefully in the future the station info will become more dynamic/interactive. I really like the purchasing features and It’s also probably great for Apple and Sirius since they link directly to iTunes. Another great feature is the fade out of the music when leaving the app. Something really simple but I really enjoyed it.
The stations load pretty fast on my WIFI connection but have not tested on 3G, if anyone can test it out post in the comments below. For right now everything seems good. Hopefully they can figure out something with the missing stations since that seems to be turing off allot of listeners.
I will use the app some more and report if there are any updates. Sirius XM already released an update this morning for 1st Gen Touch users.
I honestly can’t believe that Howard Stern is not available on the iPhone app? This is really distressing and not wise for a company who’s stock is less than a dollar?
Quite simply put- Howard Stern is about the money, and opie and Anthony are about the people. I wasn’t a fan of them initially as I was a huge fan of Howard but knowing about the gag order, knowing how lazy stern has become, and knowing that opie and Anthony are more relevant and real- I completely support them and thank them for their effort to entertain despite a HUGE attempt by sirius to force them into a second fiddle role at siriusxm. Thanks guys- keep up the good work – just for being real I’m a huge fan and never will go back.