Product Description

Personalized Radio: The Slacker Portable is the first portable player to deliver a true personal radio experience. Whether you listen to one of over 100 expert-programmed Slacker stations or your own custom stations, Slacker learns your tastes and automatically delivers new music personalized just for you. The more you listen, the better the music gets.

For Free: The Slacker Portable delivers free access to millions of songs from thousands of artists. All of the music you hear on Slacker.com is automatically sent to your Slacker Portable for free. You will always have new songs and classic tunes without paying a dime.

Everywhere: The Slacker Portable is the world’s first radio player that gives you uninterrupted access to your music wherever you are. Thousands of songs are stored on the Slacker Portable to fill up all of your personalized radio stations. Those songs are automatically refreshed each time you hit a Wi-Fi hotspot to keep the music fresh without doing any work.

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Product Details

• Size: 4 GB
• Color: black
• Brand: Slacker
• Model: 90260001
• Dimensions: 4.20" h x .67" w x 2.75" l, 3.00 pounds
• Display size: 4

Features

• 4 GB Slacker Radio and MP3 player with 25-station capacity
• Built-in Wi-Fi auto-refreshes Slacker Radio stations; music plays whether or not connected
• Plays your existing music collection (MP3, WMA, and AAC)
• 4-inch color LCD displays album art, reviews, artist bios and more
• Removable, rechargeable battery

Amazon.com Product Description -- Posted May 22, 2008
Take your personalized Slacker Radio stations with you anywhere you go. Built-in Wi-Fi auto-refreshes up to 25 Slacker Radio stations with new content, and the music plays anytime--whether or not you are connected.

With the Slacker Portable, the world's first-ever personal radio player, you can now take your favorite music with you, and discover new music along the way.

Personalized Radio

With the Slacker Portable, the world's first-ever personal radio player, you can now take your favorite music with you. Choose from more than 100 expertly programmed radio stations, or custom-build your own using the vast Slacker artist network. The more you listen, the better Slacker gets at automatically delivering the music you want to hear.

Effortless
Create your own unique radio experience with Slacker Personal Radio. You know what you like--Slacker knows how to deliver it. Slacker's Internet radio offering is built on the expertise of DJs from all over the country, and just by listening, you make Slacker even smarter at delivering more music that you love.

Music Discovery
Perfect your listening experience using Slacker's exclusive personalization tools. With the buttons, tell Slacker Radio which songs are your favorites--and which ones you never want to hear again. Fine-tune any station--get more hits, or request older artists over new, for instance. Album reviews and artist bios come with every song and are delivered right to your Slacker Portable. View them on the 4-inch color LCD.

Advanced Radio Clocks
Slacker DJs operate using a proven method of picking and mixing songs to deliver excellent musical variety that complements your tastes. This patent-pending DJ technology is embedded in the Slacker Portable to create the very best radio stations. The more you listen, the better it performs to deliver new music you'll love.

Choose from more than 100 expertly programmed radio stations, or custom-build your own.

Get new music instantly from the vast Slacker music library by connecting at hundreds of thousands of Wi-Fi spots across the country.

Slacker Basic Radio: Free

Take the world's first-ever personal radio player with you for nonstop, customized music wherever you go. On the Slacker Portable, store thousands of songs for repeated listening, or connect to a Wi-Fi hotspot to get new music instantly. With hours of battery life, the Slacker Portable is built to go where you go.

Plus, it's all completely legal. Slacker has unique licensing agreements with thousands of record labels to give you free access to a variety of music. By working directly with the record labels, Slacker gets the latest content to ensure your radio stations always stay current.

Ad Supported
To offer your favorite music for free, the Slacker Basic Radio service might play one to two ads an hour. That's significantly fewer ads than traditional radio, so you can relax and easily enjoy your favorite music.

Upgrade to Slacker Premium Radio

If you want even more out of the service, pay just $7.50 per month for Slacker Premium, which puts you in control. What's the difference between Slacker Basic and Slacker Premium? First, Premium subscribers can avoid the ads that played in the Basic service. So, it's an ad-free listening experience.

Next, Premium subscribers have access to Slacker Request Song, which lets you add your favorite artists' songs to your station. Then, use Slacker's fine-tuning controls to indicate how often those requested songs should play.

Third, Premium subscribers have no limits on the number of songs they skip, letting listeners create the exact music experience they want. (Basic listeners are limited to six skips per hour, per station.)

And fourth, as a Premium subscriber, you can save your favorite songs with the touch of a button. Saved songs are added to your library so that you can listen to them any time. You also can save your favorites to your PC using the Slacker Software Player. It's the ultimate personal radio experience.

Slacker Premium Radio at a glance:

• Just $7.50 per month
• No advertisements
• Request songs
• Unlimited skipping of songs
• Save favorites

Slacker Radio: It's Everywhere

With the Slacker Portable, get free and easy access to millions of songs from thousands of artists wherever you are. All of the music you love is automatically delivered to your Slacker Portable for free at any Wi-Fi hotspot or through your PC via USB.

Pocket DJ
The same personalized listening experience you love on Slacker.com is available wherever you go on the Slacker Portable. Slacker DJs hand pick songs for your player, and you can use the buttons on the Slacker Portable to further customize your stations. The more you listen, the better the music gets.

The Slacker Portable gives you uninterrupted access to your music wherever you are. Thousands of songs are stored on the Slacker Portable to fill up all of your personalized radio stations. That means you can listen to your stations, even if you are nowhere near a Wi-Fi connection.

Refresh On the Go
The Slacker Portable automatically can add new music at hundreds of thousands of Wi-Fi hotspots across the country. Each time you connect, songs that were hand-picked by Slacker DJs are added to your device. Plus, you can add new stations to your Slacker Portable from any PC or Mac with an Internet connection.

Built in MP3 Player

Already have your own personal music library? The Slacker Portable features a built-in MP3 player. You can store up to 500 MB of MP3s on the 2 GB/15-station Slacker Portable, 1.5 GB of MP3s on the 4 GB/25-station Slacker Portable, or 4 GB of MP3s on the 8 GB/40-station Slacker Portable. Then, listen whenever and wherever you want.

On-the-Go Playlists
Create personalized playlists with your MP3s using the intuitive controls on the Slacker Portable. Enjoy the favorites you own in any order you want. As a Slacker Premium Radio subscriber, you can mix your MP3s with saved radio tracks to fashion playlists absolutely unique to you.

Software Player
Play your own personal collection of MP3s on the your portable with Slacker Software Player. Simply plug your portable into your PC to transfer songs and refresh your radio stations. Also, such enhanced features as high-resolution, full-screen album art and a variety of visualizations track to the music on the portable's 4-inch color LCD.

What's in the Box
Slacker 4 GB Portable Radio with 25 Stations (Black), USB cable, power supply, earphones

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Customer Reviews

go for the G2 units
The Slacker portables bring a new dimension to music listening.
Without the hassle of ripping your own MP3s, the service allows you to create your own customized radio stations and then, by WiFi or USB, load them onto the player for your enjoyment at any time.

Many reviews have discussed the player in depth, so let me address a couple of issues in regards to the older player, the G1, versus the new player, the G2.

The G1 player is obviously bigger, and while one advantage is an easier to read screen, it is a bigger package to carry around.

The G1 player also has not had any further firmware updates since March '08, while the G2 player has had frequent updates. Therefore, some important features such as improved battery life, and better USB connectivity have not (yet) been updated for the G1. Please check the slacker forums if you're thinking about buying a G1 to see if any updates have occurred since this was posted.

The G1 player lacks an equalizer control setting, while this was incorporated into the G2 player. I can't say that the G2's equalizer is worth much, as they don't have any user adjustable settings.

The G2 player has a setting to manage the WiFi settings, whereas this has not (yet) been implemented in the G1 player. This again reflects the lack of any further apparent support for this first generation player.

As the price of the 8Gb G1 player has not dropped substantially (although for a time it was selling for less than [...] from Amazon), the G2 unit appears to be the primary hardware that is receiving support from the company.

The G1 player has had an annoying habit of occasionally having a break in audio at the beginning of a song. This has not been a problem with the G2 units. It is unknown what creates the problem, but there has not been a fix issued for the G1 unit to address this issue.

Remember, if you use the web based player at [...] ..... not all the songs that can be heard on the web player are licensed to be downloaded onto the portable players. The company says that there are they are continually gaining more licensing rights, but it is unclear what percentage of music that you hear on the webplayer can be transferred to the portable player. Even with this limitation, you can create a wide variety of stations and enjoy them on the units.

However, for your money, you will probably find the G2 unit less buggy, and better supported by the company with updates.

Enjoyable, if not perfect
The Slacker Portable Radio is a very usable and enjoyable device. Although I enjoy staying current, I am not usually an "early adopter" of new technology, but the stars were aligned for me on this one and I took the risk. I have not regretted it.

The best thing about the Slacker Portable is the hassle-free way a variety of music is delivered to the player. The whole concept of having music delivered to a portable player "automatically" and in a radio station format without the endless chatter of an actual radio station is appealing. In practice, the Slacker Portable works quite well, with a couple of quirks. I love the large album cover art with artist information and album reviews. Obviously, these things are not useful in the car, but when I am using the player at my desk, they work great. The music selection is good and Slacker gives the user some freedom in programming the stations.

I continue to have some very small problems with the player: music sometimes cuts out briefly at the beginning of tracks & player responds slowly to button pushes, at times. These keep me from rating the device a perfect 5 stars. I remain hopeful that these issues will be addressed, as the previous firmware updates solved some other small problems with my player. Firmware updates could not be easier since they are performed automatically when the player is updated with new music.

The best endorsement I can give is that I would buy another Slacker Portable if I had to do it over.

Not quite 5-star but Slacker is an awesome and unique "personal radio" experience!
Well, I have had my 8GB 40-station Slacker Portable for almost a month now, and I must agree with "Patent Guy", the Slacker experience is quite amazing! I use my Slacker Portable everyday, especially during my driving commute each day.

I also have Sirius Satellite radio along with the Sirius Stiletto 100 Portable radio, I use both the Slacker and the Stiletto, but they are two different devices and services which complement each other. Also have iPods, but the music selection gets stale on them quickly. Sirius is great obviously for custom content like Howard Stern and Vin Scelsa. The Slacker service is a whole new concept in personalized radio.

I am a Mac guy, so I don't use the Slacker Player for Windows, but the Slacker Portable connected to my Apple Airport Extreme immediately via WiFi at blazing speed with no problem.

Mine came pre-loaded with ten stations of my choice selected from the Slacker Web Player, and I quickly added over twenty more to the Portable. I opted to upgrade my Slacker service to "premium", which allows for much more control of the Slacker experience.

The Slacker Portable unit itself is very sleek, a little cumbersome for my hand, but once you use it for awhile, it's all right. It does fit in a shirt or jacket pocket, I use it in my shirt pocket with ear buds and it works great.

The actual hardware takes some getting used to, and the button placement and design could be better, I keep hitting unintended buttons to perform tasks and it does the opposite of what I want. The large screen is gorgeous and brilliant, and the copious information screens for each song/artist that you can toggle through are great. I wish there was another screen for lyrics for each song, that would be awesome! It has a battery compartment which in theory you can open and replace the battery if needed, not sure if Slacker will offer the option to buy replacement batteries in the future. Other accessories in the works include a home and car dock, not available yet.

I have numerous stations on both the Web Player and the Portable, and the customization level of each station is phenomenal! You can control the amount of "new artists" discovered for each station, and turn off the "DJ" feature (this control is premium service only), This "DJ" feature is annoying to me, as it inserts Slacker promos, DJ comments derived from the radio station's genre, and also paid commercial ads.

That was the main reason I upgraded to the Slacker premium service, to be able to eliminate this "DJ/Promos/Ads" feature is well worth it to me! What's the point of this new "personalized' radio if it contains the same pesky promos, commentary and ads I am trying to avoid from terrestrial radio? Also, the premium service allows you to "Save" almost any song (provided the rights to save that song have been purchased by Slacker). You can "save" songs to the Web Player OR the Portable, sometimes certain songs can be saved to one and not the other, for licensing reasons.

Premium service also allows song requests and unlimited song "skips", which is useful for rapidly bypassing ("banning") songs I don't like to reach songs I can designate as a "favorite" and save. This process applies to each Slacker station. Slacker has tons of pre-configured stations, or you can create your own with just the artists you like, or stations can be shared from other users on the Slacker Forums.

I am amazed at the depth of music and range of great songs I can now access with my customized stations. I am constantly hearing favorite songs I love from all genres that I haven't heard played on any radio platform for years! Of course, I can immediately save these to my Web Player or Portable library to play anytime. The library can be set to "shuffle-play" like a huge playlist.

The killer feature of the Slacker Portable is that the music selection for each station is updated, expanded and refreshed every time you connect via WiFi (auto-connect occurs each time you plug in the AC charger). This is where the "surprise" element comes in, when you play each station again, there is a new roster of songs/artists to discover! Wifi connections also allow the Portable to update its own firmware automatically.

You can also create custom playlists, and "ban" & "favorite" songs or even artists, and if you change your mind and decide you want to hear a previously banned song, you can "un-ban" it via the Software Player.

Overall, for me the Slacker Portable is unique and satisfying experience, I am very pleased with it in general. It has a few quirks to resolve, but these can be addressed with future firmware updates. Slacker tech support is very responsive to user comments and suggestions.