Phoenix Landing

Well, the upcoming XM Radio portable player (previously codenamed 'Phoenix') is making its official media debut... in Popular Science magazine. We still don't have an official price, but speculation suspects a release date around October 5, 2008.

XM is pushing the new XMp3's ability to record five XM Radio stations at once. It never occurred to us that anyone would want to do this, but now that we can, how can we not? The XMp3 is smaller and looks a lot slicker than XM's last player, the Inno. Plus, with an SD card slot for transferring mp3 files, it looks like the XMp3 is shaping up as an interesting contender.

In a market that seems flooded with media players trying to take a slice out of Apple's share of the pie, at least the XMp3 is offering something different. Unfortunately, we doubt anyone but the most avid XM listeners will be thrilled about the five-broadcast simultaneous recording. Radio in general is still a niche audience and the XMp3 would have to be one heck of a media player to tempt new XM subscribers.

Meanwhile, we're trying to pick out our four favorite decades to record while we're listening to the next Red Sox game.

[Via Engadget]