Slacker G2 Personal Radio
The Slacker G2, available to buy in either 4GB or 8GB incarnations (for $190/$250), is not your typical portable music player. Devices such as Apple’s range of iPods work by allowing you to transfer music onto them from a computer, and then play them back. The Slacker G2 includes a little of that functionality, but it’s not the main game. Instead, the Slacker G2 works by downloading music directly from the internet whenever it is connected via WiFi or via a PC that is online.
Confused? The key to understanding the Slacker G2 is to know that its music-grabbing feature is linked to the account that you set up with the Slacker online music service located at www.slacker.com. The memory on the Slacker is mostly reserved for storing music that is transferred from this service in the form of virtual radio stations – up to 25 different stations with up to 2,500 tracks in total for the 4GB model, and up to 40 stations with up to 4,000 tracks for the 8GB model. (Note that MP3/WMA files you transfer from a PC in the traditional way are limited to 1GB total for the 4GB Slacker G2 and 3GB for the 8GB.)
Still confused? There’s more: you choose the ‘radio stations’ that you want your Slacker G2 to track on the Slacker website. There are over 100 pre-programmed stations to choose from, or you can create your own. Then, whenever the Slacker G2 goes online (which must be at least once every 14 days), it automatically refreshes the music in each station so that you have new tunes to listen to off-line. During playback album artwork is displayed, and you can also access such goodies as artist bios, song data and album info. All in all, it’s a pretty clever system.
So that’s the Slacker service. As far as the physical side of things goes, the Slacker G2 is decently well-made, though nothing special. It is compact at 3.5 x 2.2 x 0.5 inches, curvy, sturdy, and it has a good and quite roomy 2.4 inch screen. Below the screen are play/pause and track shuttle buttons, and above the screen are ‘Heart’ and ‘Ban’ buttons. Press the Ban button while a song is playing and it’ll stop and you’ll never hear it again; press the Heart button and you’re more likely to hear it (and songs like it) again.
There is some rough to go along with the smooth. The controls system is not intuitive, battery life is not great, sound quality is mediocre, and there’s no support for the storing, playing or viewing of photos and videos that we’ve come to expect from modern MP3 players (or to give them a more appropriate name, ‘portable media players’).
But enough about the Slacker G2’s technical specifications. The question is: is this out-of-left-field device any good? The answer is very much ‘it depends.’ If you have a large music collection, take your tunes seriously, are an audiophile, or all of the above, you’re probably going to hate the Slacker G2’s random approach to music. If on the other hand you love discovering new music, couldn’t be bothered maintaining your own music collection, or just want all the hassle taken out of listening to music on the go – then you might just have found your dream device.
