Digital Home Thoughts: Delphi's SkyFi2: Even More Music to Shake Sticks At!

Other Odds and Ends
The SkyFi2 has a host of other little changes that are a blessing or a curse, depending on the change.

The addition of an integrated FM transmitter is useful for people who don't have another way to get the audio into their car stereo. I have a line in on my car, but when we were back home for Christmas I used the SkyFi2 in our rental car and the transmitter worked great. In the menu I selected an FM frequency that was free on the local airwaves, and the audio was beamed through just fine. The audio quality was, as you might expect, not as good as with line in, but it was still quite acceptable.

The stock ticker and sports scores are, well, just there. I don't find them particularly useful, and other than setting up one stock I haven't used them much. I did note that the sports scores menu did not have a listing for WNBA scores. Hopefully that can be changed over-the-air, and will be updated when the new WNBA season starts.

In my August review I lamented the lack of a scan function that would pause on each channel for a few seconds before moving to the next. The SkyFi2 adds this functionality, but in a way that makes it completely useless: the scan function is overloaded on the same key you use to bring up a list of channels by category. I use the category list all the time to see everything that's playing on my preset channels. If you want to make the button behave as a scan button you have to go all the way into the menu to change its behaviour. It's an incredibly frustrating design decision, and it means I never use scan even though it's something I really wanted in the first version.

A nice improvement from the old unit is the ability for the SkyFi2 to power on with the car. This is a vast improvement over the previous version, and even though it's a small change really goes a long way to improving in-car usability. They've also given a perceived performance boost to the unit by allowing it to flip to a station and display track information before it's actually started to play the audio. The older version wouldn't display the track info until the music came on. This change is a real win when you're flipping quickly between your presets.

The only other nit I have to pick is how Delphi changed the scroll behaviour for lists. In the original version the lists by channel category would wrap. When you had your 10 preset channels up you could keep pressing "down" and eventually see what was playing on all 10 channels. The new version stops at the 10th item. So if you're listening to preset 5, and want to see what's on the other presets, you have to scroll down to 10 then all the way back up to 1. This is maddening, especially while driving, as it's extra attention you have to pay to the unit instead of staying focused on the road.

Conclusion
I love my new SkyFi2. There's no doubt that the new features and changes make it a significant improvement over the first version. People new to XM radio should absolutely grab this unit over its predecessor, and the SkyFi2 is a very tempting upgrade for owners of the older unit. The 30 minute buffer and TuneSelect (even with its minor glitches) are well worth the price of admission!