Slacker Radio: Free music for your iPhone
As we noted in our review of the Slacker G2 music player, the real future of the company lies on other devices. They just launched the BlackBerry version of Slacker — and we've gotten a heads up that they've just put the iPhone version on the iTunes App Store.
It works just like the G2 player, with the free version given access to millions of songs on 100 different stations, each streamed over the air — even EDGE — to the iPhone. You can upgrade to enhanced levels of service that let you skip an increased number of songs, as well as ban the artists you don't like to keep them out of your streaming queue in the future.
Considering how popular the Pandora iPhone application has been, I wouldn't be surprised to see Slacker moving more copies of their free iPhone app than they've ever sold physical players.
One downside to the iPhone app compared to the dedicated Slacker hardware, however: as of yet, there's no buffer for saving streams for when you're away from a signal. No internet? No music. It's possible they could apportion a few hundred megabytes of the iPhone's storage as an offline buffer, but I sort of doubt we'll see that feature any time soon. They do still sell G2 players, after all.
Over my 3G connection it took about 10 seconds to buffer the first song, although skipping to the next song only took about 4 seconds.
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Boo! Looks like the app is only available in the US
Wait a minute... What's better about this than the Pandora app I'm using?
If someone built an app that was Pandora, but had the ability to buy albums from Amazon and then download the tracks straight to my iPhone I'd use it, but I can't think of a lot of ways other than that to improve on Pandora.
The BlackBerry version of this software does allow you to buffer songs onto your microSD card.
It's not my app store. Since this site is global, you may want to note that this is not available outside the USA when writing about it. Not doing so comes across as kind of arrogant, you know?
I'm a RadioTime fan. I just found out that they will make a Windows Mobile 6 version.
I gotta get my "Bruce Williams", "Dave Ramsey", & "George Noory"
http://www.wmexperts.com/wunderradio-windows-mobile
Slacker Radio website is US only as well, and claims to be trying to get licences elsewhere, but yeah a heads up for all the non-US people would be nice. Although I guess they've not figured out how we could use VPN on our computers to get past that nasty detail (like with hulu et al).
How is this very different from what the free last.fm app does ? Not sure if this one does buffering .. it runs kinda edgy even via wifi