Frankly, Sirius is doing nothing with its mobile service. As a Sprint subscriber, I was very interested in trying out the Sirius subscription service, but I was deeply disappointed. Only 20 channels, most of them are annoying pop or rap. Only a few rock stations, and they weren't the type of rock I was looking for (why can't they have either a decent classic rock station or a decent modern rock station? Are there really that many hair metal fans that want to listen to it on their phones?). The sound quality was nice, but the buffering when I wasn't on an EV-DO connection was a bit annoying - it would take about 30 seconds to start playing a station or change a station, and would occasionally cut out for 5 to 10 seconds. That wouldn't be a problem up here in Buffalo - I can get EV-DO pretty much anywhere up here - but back home in Binghamton, all we've got right now is 1xRTT, and it was just not worth half the subscription fee for a full radio to get such a limited service.

From what I've seen of XM's mobile channel lineup, I would be a bit more interested in that service, but they still don't have channels like Squizz, which makes zero sense - if you are making a mobile service - one that will likely be used mostly by teenagers and twenty-somethings - why wouldn't you have a rock channel that caters to their taste? Frankly, since the streams are essentially just lower quality versions of the XMRO streams, why can't they offer the same or a similar lineup?

The question is, what are Sirius and XM doing with this foot in the door?

Great question...as a satellite radio fan, I can be hard on the industry sometimes but things are growing so quickly that satellite radio can't take a break. Maybe a few years ago but not now. They have to play catch up and make there service integrated with the cell phone (and not jsut a few channels).

I just hope the industry I love starts setting the standard...in the very near future.

If ever there was a crystal ball where someone can say (pretty definitively) that "this will be big" - it's mobile music.

The only thing we don't know is... when? and how?

And it's the "how" that they can control right now.

I would love it if I could get Sirius on the iPhone, which I think will bury all the other "convergence" devices.

Not that difficult, considering I can't think of a true convergence device that hasn't been an abject failure, mostly due to idiotic DRM restrictions and a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none design mentality that usually results in the device pleasing no one except the lawyers and the retarded committee that designed it. Though it's not out yet, I get the feeling Apple won't make those mistakes.

Even if Sirius needs to beg, borrow or steal, partnering with Apple would be as important as signing Stern was a year ago. It would give them access to millions of customers that probably could give a damn about Satellite Radio.

And the reason VCast is an utter failure is mostly due to lousy usability and Verizon treating their customers like criminals with shitty DRM restrictions. They're way too greedy and I doubt they're smart enough to fix these problems. If Apple releases a Verizon iPhone, they will eventually control a decent portion of the cell phone market.

What are they doing with this foot in the door? Not a whole lot. Because it's the device manufacturers whose doors need to be broken into, not the carriers. Admittedly, some good will on the part of the carriers in communicating with the manufacturers certainly doesn't hurt.

I'd expect to see XM built into a cell phone before I would expect to see Sirius. Part of the reason is because most cell phones can already play MPEG 4/AAC, so AACplus is trivial to add as a supported codec. If the XM chipset can send out a raw AACplus stream to be decoded by the phone, all that needs to be put into the phone is the basic chipset to receive the XM signal.

With Sirius using a different codec, and with a chipset that is still significantly larger than XM's, it'll be a while before Sirius could potentially end up embedded in a phone or other device.

will this L9 phone be compatable with verizon wireless phone accounts?