Slacker Mobile Radio for iPhone and iPod Touch – a must have application

Wednesday, February 4, 2009, 9:44
Cell Phones
346 views
View Comments

slackeriphone Slacker, the streaming Internet radio company, with its mobile radio, has aimed to let iPhone and iPod touch users stream highly customized, free Slacker Internet radio stations. Interestingly, Slacker released a similar product for BlackBerry a few weeks ago. If you like Slacker radio, then this iPhone application is an excellent innovation and an extremely good way to take your radio stations with you. The best part is that the application is absolutely free. The Slacker Mobile Radio application for iPhone or iPod touch can be downloaded from the iTunes store. If you have never used Slacker before, you will need to sign up for an account at Slacker’s Web site. Slacker Premium is offered at $3.99 per month and offers you unlimited skips of songs per station and also sidesteps the advertisements that come in between the music.

The Slacker application looks lovely on the big 3.5-inch screen of the iPhone or the touch. Album art dominates most of the screen, with buttons such as Forward Track, Setting, Volume, Pause, Slacker’s trademark Ban, and Heart. The Ban button banishes tracks you don’t like and the Heart button lets you brand your favorite tracks so they come with greater frequency in your station’s rotation. You can skip the Forward Track button and simply flick the screen to advance to the next song. However, the accelerometer of the iPhone or the touch does not come into play in the case of this application.

The station’s button at the top of the screen lets you access a list of your custom stations along with the other regular ones. The “Find Artists” mode lets you build a station around a single artist of your choice. Tapping on the current track name gives you the full band history along with a detailed description of the album. The buy buttons navigates you to the iTunes store where you can buy the track. The tunes sound extremely good Wi-Fi and very decent over 3G. Overall the Slacker Mobile Radio may have its limitations, but it is a fun and free way to get customized Internet radio on the iPhone or the iPod touch.