The Wall Street Journal’s Walter Mossberg gives a pretty favorable review to a new portable music player called Slacker Personal Radio.
The Wi-Fi enabled device, which was originally due out for the holiday shopping season but is now expected by late January, downloads music when it can connect to the Internet and plays it back to you while you’re on the go. Slacker’s free music service won’t play specific songs on demand, but it does learn your general tastes and select songs you should like.
The new Slacker players will come in three models, ranging from $200 to $300, depending on capacity. But the music they play will be absolutely free, contained in preprogrammed Internet radio stations instead of individually selected songs and albums. The stations will be automatically refreshed with new tunes via a wireless connection built right into the device. You’ll have to be near a hot spot for these updates. But you won’t need a hot spot just to hear your music, because the songs are cached on the device. And you’ll never have to plug it into a computer.
The player is tied to Slacker’s free Internet radio service, slacker.com1, which is already up and running, and allows you to listen to music via any standard Windows or Mac Web browser. Using the service, you can personalize your player by selecting from over 100 canned stations or by creating stations based around any of 10,000 artists. These stations will be beamed to your player wirelessly. You can even choose which stations are loaded onto your player before the company ships it to you.
Readers of this blog should know that I’m all for personalized Web radio stations that learn your music tastes and pipe free songs to you. That said, I object to the idea of paying several hundred dollars for a stand-alone device that lets me take this music on the road. A decent cellphone should be able to do all this for free. (Well, free for folks like me who have bought the phone and subscribe to an unlimited data transfer package.)
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