Slacker Personal Radio
Monday, April 14, 2008
I wrote about this a while ago when it was still in development mode. Just this weekend I received an email stating that the players are now for sale. For those of you not familiar with Slacker.com its a very cool website and the portable player is very cool. Slacker was born out of the old Musicmatch jukebox which ruled the digital world until iTunes became the universal standard. There are a number of stations broken down by genres kinda like satellite radio. You can take it a step further by selecting artists themselves and Slacker will recast an updated playlist based on similar artists. When you select a specific artist, different songs will play every 4-5 songs and you have the ability to skip past tracks. This is a free website that can be accessed from any computer. You do not need a separate player since everything is streamed thru the website.
Although the site is free you will have to purchase the handheld. Prices are $199 for 15 stations, $249 for 25 stations and $299 for 40 stations. These stations can be changed so you are not locked into any specific genre or artist. The handheld operates on a WiFi network streaming from the website when in range and caching songs when no network connectivity is present. The player holds up to 4000 songs that are refreshed when connected to the network. You don't have to worry about repeats since there is plenty of space to hold a vast collection of songs before your next sync. For $7.50 a month you can subscribe to the premium service which allows for unlimited skipping (the free only gives you so many each hour) and even more personalization. Slacker has found a way to combine the iPod with satellite radio and repackage it into an easy to use interface. You have the portability of an iPod, the music selection of satellite radio and you do not have to purchase any music or sit around trying to organize a playlist, hence the Slacker name.
I will admit, Slacker isn't perfect sometimes the artist selection isn't very deep and features shallow comparisions but for free I can't complain. I am interested in seeing the handheld in action and depending on battery life and how long it took to sync I might be interested.
If you havn't signed up for your free account, check out www.slacker.com and give the website a chance.
Posted by mardenhill 4/14/2008 09:30:00 AM
Labels: Technology
