Eugene: If you never leave the urban areas then local radio is fine...though commercial and talk free is a very nice bonus...and if I want to relive my childhood the 70s and 80s only stations are always close at hand.

The reason I bought one in the first place is because I do a lot of camping and I do at least one 5000km-8000km road trip a year. The satellte radio becomes a huge asset at this point especially if driving through Utah or Ontario or anywhere the towns are few and far between. The variety of programming is also nice. Having 3 dedicated comedy channels (sometimes 4) when you've been on the road 12 hours and are a wee bit sleepy sure helps.

It's really too bad there isn't more thought put into integration of these devices. I'd kill to have a satellite radio that could do am/fm/NOAA frequencies too or to have a weather radio built into my GPS...or my car. It makes so much sense and the technology is so simple it could easily be done. Instead we're forced to buy dedicated hardware or another radio within a radio to go inside the car or backpack which may already have several radios in it. Don't get me wrong; I'm totally on board with the risks of having too many 'all in one' devices (or just one all in one device) but if you're going to have a 'radio' why not just have one to cover all your radio needs? If you're going to use weather as part of your navigation planning, why not have it built into your GPS (though as was discussed there are some emerging technologies moving in the right direction)?

On top of that the geek in me is even more upset that the devices which are out there don't have Bluetooth capability. I have bluetooth everything and it would be so handy to have a radio set up not unlike a cellular phone that could just connect to a headset or handsfree device (or my GPS) and alert me without having 5 devices in my car competing for my auditory attention...unfortunately integration is only as good as the hardware which integrates (or doesn't integrate) them.

I guess I could blame free enterprise and market competition. Why would Sirius or XM allow a person to use their products to access a free service? Why would a GPS (which accesses satellites already) not use more satellites to access additional features? Makes sense...but that doesn't mean I have to like it