Satellite radio coming to BlackBerry

Canadians will soon be able to listen to satellite radio on their BlackBerry smart phones. The U.S. satellite radio company Sirius XM Radio Inc. announced the launch of a BlackBerry application yesterday, prompting Canada's two rivals in the field - Sirius Canada Inc. and XM Canada - to say they have similar plans in the works. "We'll have a BlackBerry announcement shortly," Sirius Canada CEO Mark Redmond said yesterday. "We want to give our paying subscribers the ability to access our content anywhere." XM Canada is also looking to "expand into different mobile platforms," said Janet Gillespie, vice president of marketing. The BlackBerry announcement will be the next step in that mobile strategy. Neither Canadian company has a firm date on when the application will launch. In the U.S., Sirius XM's new app is similar to the one for the iPhone that it launched in June. Both programs are run on software that is free to download, and after a free trial period, listeners must subscribe to keep using it.