Slacker Radio Rocks on the Blackberry

Jan 8, 2009 Apps

Lack of a high quality free web radio player has left the blackberry community crying foul to Pandora and other online radio networks. Yes, you can pay for the XM radio service, or use flycast which is decent but a little limited or use orb to stream your own music collection from your computer to your device and this works ok as well.

Of course, today at CES in Vegas, streaming media player Slacker.com announced their new blackberry client and it has the community clamoring for more. The slacker player is a downloadable client that loads on your blackberry and plays streaming music flawlessly (one pause for buffering in 10 minutes of play!) over my bold and the quality is amazing as well.

The download and install was rather straight foward, simply head over to Slacker.com on your phone (in the blackberry browser) and you can download the app. Once installed you do need to create an account which, again was amazingly simple through the app on my phone. Email, password, year of birth and zipcode (This seems to work only in the states at the moment) and I was online. A quick search and viola, I was listing to the Jimy Buffett station which is comparable to the one I found on Pandora.

Slacker offers a free service which is ad supported and limits you to 6 song skips a day. For $3.95 a month you can upgrade to pro which gets you ad free listening on both your computer and mobile device and unlimited skips. To me, the small pricetag is worth it.

I did attempt to log in to the player on my phone while I was listening on my computer and my computer account was logged out. A small issue, but one most of us can live with. Another nice feature is the fact that it keeps playing in the background if you switch to another app (something not all the offerings do). At this point, it seems Slacker will quickly become the streaming audio app of choice. Is there one you’re using?

Tags: Blackberry, Bold, Pandora, Slacker, Streaming, Streaming Radio