A satellite radio…that doubles as an MP3 player. Bloomberg Boot Camp, a report on today's technology. New details on the partnership between XM Satellite Radio, Samsung and Napster. The new device being built by Samsung….is tiny….and includes built in flash memory…either half a gigabyte or a full gigabyte…..that can be used for recording songs from XM….or for storing and playing your own collection of MP3s. And through the partnership with Napster…music recorded from XM….that you want to keep permanently, can be purchased. How well that business model works remains to be seen…..but the device itself…has plenty of gee-whiz factor. Dinesh Moorjani is Samsung's senior manager of new business development…
"It's about, maybe less than half the size of the current Delphi Tower XM to Go product. And what it does is it marries the best of music discovery with the best of music consumption. So it allows users to discover music that they wouldn't have ordinarily found by managing their existing music collection with MP3s, but bringing that together with the ability to record, save and intermingle XM program content.
On the downside, there is no memory card slot to add to the storage capacity. Samsung says the one gigabyte model will be able to hold about 750 songs recorded from XM's channels. We don't yet know how much the device…scheduled to arrive later this year…will cost. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.