Roughly the footprint of a deck of cards and a few millimeters thinner, the attractive Inno slips easily into a pocket or purse. At 4.5 ounces, it’s a little heavier than you might expect--if you’re comparing it to nanoweight MP3 players--but the size makes up for the slight heft.

The brushed aluminum finish is sleek and contemporary. Buttons are integrated into the surface of the device except for the volume and power buttons which are raised types. Cool blue backlights illuminate the buttons borders. A four-way directional keypads surrounds a button bearing the XM logo, which serves as enter and menu key.

You have to spend some time with the manual to learn how to navigate through the device. Ten buttons overall are responsible for getting you through all the record, channel, volume and MP3 features, and it’s not always intuitive getting around. To access your favorite stations, you hit the right arrow key, which you’d only guess by trial-and-error or by caving and reading the manual. Hitting the left arrow either jumps you through categories or allows for direct tuning using an onscreen dial pad.

The small square display uses color well, showing a blue antenna icon in the upper left corner when you’re in reach of an XM signal. A lime green battery indicator shows the time remaining in the quickly depleting charge. When you’re in XM’s reach, the XM logo appears top and center. If you’re out of range, you see My Music which includes any XM songs you’ve recorded, any Napster downloads you’ve synched with the device or any of your MP3 or WMA tunes you’ve downloaded to the device from the PC. White numbers read time of day on the upper right. The main display reads out XM channel, track title, remaining time and total length of the track.

 

Inno can record up to 50 hours of XM programming. By default it comes set to store 25 hours each of XM and PC files. You can change the partition but will lose all stored XM content if you do, so any such changes should be made from the get go. But you don’t buy Inno to load up on WMA files. The 1-gig of storage is too limiting for it to replace an MP3 player altogether. The ability to download songs from Napster is a nice add but not the killer app. You want to record XM.

Recording can be real time or scheduled. The device needs AC power in either case and a strong XM signal. The built-in memory buffer lets you record a song up to 10 minutes in length from the beginning even if you came in during the middle (as long as the device was on and tuned to that channel).

The TuneSelect feature stores favorite artists or song titles and automatically switches channels if the band or song appears elsewhere on the XM grid. None of my faves ever popped up, but I thought it was a fun idea. You can also bookmark songs or artists so you can remember them later. Then when you connect Inno to the PC using XM+Napster software, you can download songs to the Inno if you didn’t record it earlier.

You can also set the Inno to deliver data that’s retrievable via the Display button on the front panel. You can select stock quotes or baseball scores. I chose the latter but I wasn’t psyched about either since I don’t know which is performing worse right now: my stocks or my St. Louis Cardinals.

 
Pioneer Inno