XM SkyDock is a Docking Station for your iPod Touch or iPhone

With each passing moment the iPhone gets a little bit better, and I'm beginning to think that there is nothing that the iPhone is not capable of doing. Sirius XM will be releasing a dock connector accessory receiver for the iPhone and iPod touch at a media event next Wednesday, allowing full Sirius XM service via their devices. This is a pretty big deal for those out there who have already been using and love satellite radio as well as those who are interested in trying it out. The XM SkyDock is a docking station for your iPod Touch or iPhone that turns it into a satellite XM Radio receiver. The dock will consist of an XM antenna, power cord (also featuring the new transmitter technology), and docking station that turns your iPod/iPhone into an XM Satellite Radio receiver using the Sirius XM app.

The Sirius XM Premium Online iPhone application was released in June, and it will act as the interface for the satellite service. The dock should be priced at just under a hundred dollars which seems pretty reasonable. I am looking forward to the release of the dock as I am sure it will be pretty sweet. Below is a diagram of the dock design.

How to Find New iPhone Applications

To keep track of the ever changing list of applications for the iPhone and the iPod Touch AppShopper is a great resource.

As you look across the top of the page you may choose to search on All, Paid, or Free apps. There is also a button for Updates, New Apps and Price Changes.

One of the more convenient ways of keeping track of new applications you may be interested in is to use RSS feeds which will alert you of new changes.

The RSS Feeds come in a variety of choices as well. You may choose to be alerted to all changes in the app store, only new apps, only paid and updates as well as price changes have their own feed.

The new iPod shuffle with VoiceOver

The New iPod shuffle seems to be smaller and has a sleek look to it.Quite thin in size and can holdup to 4GB of songs (up to 1000 songs). Like the previous shuffle, it does not have a display on it and comes with a clip. This shuffle comes with additional features which the previous version did not have...

Now you can have your iPod shuffle talk to you as you listen to your song. It has the capability to tell you the name of the artist and the song name by the push of a button by a new feature called VoiceOver. It also tells you the name of the playlist since this iPod lets you have multiple playlists for your songs.

One of the negative features I find is the location of the control buttons. The play, pause, next/previous buttons are location on the wire of the earplugs which means you have to use Apple's earplugs in order to use this iPod. Everything is controled from there except the on and off switch which is on the shuffle itself. Apple did say they would provide an adapter for 3rd Party headphones so lets see what that looks like.

Overall I'm not a big fan of the shuffle since I would like to see the song I am listening to rather than hear a VoiceOver tell me about it so that I can shuffle through them. Seems to have a very sleek look to it and is tiny compared to the previous version.

What do you think of the new iPod shuffle?

Backing Up Songs From Your Ipod Onto Your Hard Drive

Recently my 30GB Video Ipod started giving me trouble. The sound into my headphones was reduced to 'mono', coming through only the left earbud. I then contacted Apple and figured out the ipod was beyond repair- and yes I tried multiple pairs of headphones, which is not the issue.

As a result I figured I needed a new mp3 player but I had a large percentage of songs on my ipod that are not in my library. Therefore, I figured my next steps had to be to backup all my ipod contents, again in order to not lose a significant amount of music.

Ipod Copy Expert is the tool I used to perform this task of allowing me to backup my data; kind of a reverse Itunes Library. In my own example this allowed me to then put my entire library of songs onto a new or in my case, my wife's ipod. Many people who like this tool just want a backup of their data to cover a lost/stolen or broken ipod, etc.

There is a $20 charge to use the full version of this software, but that is the price of recovering just 20 songs; so for me this was a no brainer. The interface itself acts like your Itunes library and is very simply to operate.

Go try out the free version (below) and reply/comment with what you think and with what your experience was.

http://www.ipod-computer.com/iPod-Transfer