Sirius/XM on Android

Sirius/XM has released an Android application which allows you to listen to the satellite radio stations on your phone.  Once I downloaded the application, I was able to play all of the Sirius/XM station, over wifi and 3G.

Unfortunately, they decided not to put the application in the Android Market, but you have to download it manually.  This will mean that updates to the application will not be automatically shown to the user, when they become available.  Also, if you have to restore your phone, this application will not be automatically reinstalled.

The other problem that I have had with the application is that when the application loses the connection, it plays the data in the buffer, and continues to loop that audio.

I will probably pay for the premium streaming, once the free trial ends, as I like listening to this content at work.

[via MarketWatch]

On My Way

On My Way is an pretty cool Android application.  When you are going somewhere, and someone is expecting you, you can use On My Way.

When you launch On My Way, you can start sharing.  When you do that the application generates a url that you can share with people who are expecting you.  If they access that url, they will see an embedded map that shows your current location.

It would be very cool if you could also specify your destination in the app, so then the web page could also show your ETA.

Ping!

On Friday, I saw that the Ping! iPhone application was available for free. Ping is an iPhone application that let’s you have SMS or instant message conversations with other people with iPhones or iPod Touches. Ping! uses Apple’s push notification service, so don’t need to leave the application running to keep receiving messages.

The benefit if using push over tradition SMS messages is that it is cheaper, if you only want to talk to people who also have iPhones or iPods.  This is also especially true if you have a limited number of text messages per month on your plan.   Also for iPod users, since they don’t have access to SMS, this may be a viable solution.

I don’ think that I will be using this application that often. Since I already uses SMS with people who are not using iPhones, I don’t know if it would be worth it to use a separate application for the subset of my contacts that have iPhones and also have Ping! installed.