Texas Instruments has announced a chip and reference design that makes it extremely simple to integrate XM's latest Connect-and-Play technology (ie, the XM Passport) into a hard-drive based player MP3 player. Or, maybe more specifically... a dock for any, that's right ANY, digital audio (iPod? hmmm...) player.
Not to mention, it's cheap and simple to integrate. OEMs just need to pay a one-time license fee of $20k plus the price of the chip, and instantly they can make an XM-Ready dock for their digital audio player that will interface with the XM Passport. Manufacturers now can even build XM Satellite Radio capability into the portable digital audio unit due to the built-in power efficiency of the design. The hardware support is pretty impressive: color LCD / NTSC displays, FM tuners, photo and video decode, rechargeable battery-based subsystem, audio codec support (AAC, AAC Plusx, MP3, WMA and others), line-in encoding, USB 2.0, and the latest DRM technologies.
I have a funny feeling these might pop up very soon in, uhm, mostly white-colored docking stations... but hey, that's all just speculation.
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