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Sirius to retailers: stop taking Stiletto pre-orders
It looks like those folks jonesing to get their portable Sirius on are going to have to wait just a little bit longer, as the satellite radio giant has apparently asked all of its retail partners to suspend pre-orders on the Stiletto 100 until further notice. The TSS Radio e-tail site where the information first appeared claims that they "still expect the Stiletto near the end of September / early October," although another authorized retailer, Crutchfield, has taken down its pre-order page altogether. So far no one seems to know exactly why Sirius made this move at such a late date, but aside from supply problems (which are unlikely), the major contender for the delay would seem to be our old friends over at the RIAA. What's strange about this scenario is that unlike rival XM -- which is still battling the record labels over licensing fees for their portable players / recorders -- Sirius seems to have made nice with the recording industry following the little brouhaha over its dockable S50 player. Bottom line is that we don't like a mystery, so we're gonna poke around a little more and see if we can get to the bottom of this unexpected development -- meanwhile, it's SiriuCE or bust for live, pocketable (albeit crappy) Sirius content until further notice.
Sirius poised to release Stiletto portable receiver
Better late than never, Sirius is finally on the verge of releasing its first "personal live satellite radio product" to consumers, who will see the device ship by the end of the summer and possibly as early as this month. We first spotted the rather chunky-looking player about a month ago in the hands of CEO Mel Karamazin, who said in a recent conference call that the so-called Stiletto (it's not clear if that's the official product moniker or simply an internal codename) has now been in beta testing for a few weeks and seems ready for prime-time (Mel referred to it, probably not without some bias, as "great"). As you're probably aware, rival XM has already brought a number of XM2GO products to market -- most recently, the Samsung Helix and Pioneer Inno -- while Sirius is still stuck in the dark ages with its dockable S50. Personally, we couldn't be happier about this impending release; we can't wait to give up the crappy sound quality we're getting with SiriuCE on our Windows Mobile phones, and we're sure our wireless carriers will be just as pleased when we stop sucking down so many gigs of data.
