I pulled the trigger on a Slacker G2 Personal Radio Player over the weekend.
For those unfamiliar with Slacker (as was I until about 2 days ago), they are a streaming internet "radio" service, not unlike Pandora or last.fm.
Slacker has over 100 stations covering most popular musical genres, and a couple of comedy stations. The programming of these stations is handled by former terrestrial and satellite radio folks. In addition to the professionally-programmed stations, users can create their own stations: You specify an artist, and the service will build a station around similar music. Stations can be shared with other Slacker users, and there are many Slacker stations that have been created to emulate current and former XM and Sirius stations.
Both standard and user-generated stations can be tweaked to the tastes and preferences of the individual listener. For example, you can ban particular artists or songs from a station, request specific songs, and fine tune the selection of songs (hits vs. deep cuts, current vs. older tunes, etc.) that are selected for inclusion in each station. They have over 2 million tunes in their catalog, from Chet Atkins to Frank Zappa.
The web-based streaming music player is ad-supported, and you can skip 6 songs per hour within a given station. For $48/yr., you can upgrade to their Radio Plus package that gets rid of the ads, and allows unlimited skips.
However, Slacker has an additional listening option: You can buy a portable unit (the Slacker G2) that looks like an mp3 player and caches several hours of audio for listening offline, thereby allowing Slacker to compete with Sirius/XM. In fact, Best Buy merchandises the Slacker alongside the satellite radios, on the opposite side of the store from the iPods and other MP3 players. The 4GB unit can store up to 25 stations, or approximately 2500 songs.
The portable G2 keeps its content refreshed by connecting to the slacker.com servers over Wi-Fi from your home network (incl. WEP/WPA), or via a public Wi-Fi hotspot. Protected public hotspots are accessed by the G2 via Slacker's partnership with Devicescape, allowing you to refresh your music content at the airport/Starbucks/McDonalds/etc.
There are a bunch of very mixed reviews regarding the G2 hardware, but my first 24 hours with it have been extremely positive. The Wi-Fi setup just worked, as did an automated firmware upgrade and the initial download of a half-dozen stations that I set up on my local account.
My take on the G2: It feels like the offspring of an iPod and a Zippo lighter, and the packaging is such that it would feel at home at the Hard Rock Hotel gift shop. The controls are intuitive, and the inclusion of album art, artist bios, and album reviews add to the experience, especially when discovering new artists. I'm also very pleased with the audio quality of the device.
Of interest to Mac users: While Slacker's desktop software is Windows-only, please note that you never need to connect the G2 to your laptop, assuming that you have a Wi-Fi connection available.
In closing, Slacker is a technology that works best if you buy into their abstraction and think of G2 like a radio, albeit a magical personalized one.
I know it's only rock and roll cached AAC+v2 files, but I like it.
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