Slacker G2: Cool Service That Needs to Be on My Cell Phone

Kevin Maney writes: I've been living with the Slacker G2 personal radio device for a few weeks, and I find that the question is not whether I like it -- it's where it fits in my life.

In the end, I found myself wishing Slacker would license this service to cell phone makers and carriers, so I could have the music without carrying an extra device. There is, in fact, a forthcoming BlackBerry version of Slacker.

Slacker comes from the people who created Musicmatch and other early music services. They've been working for a while to figure out how to make a Pandora-like experience portable, so you can take it on a plane or to the gym. So that meant Slacker had to create two pieces. One is the Web-based service, which is quite a bit like Pandora -- better in some ways, not quite as good in others. (Pandora does a better job mixing in music from new, fringe artists that's similar to your taste in well-known artists.) The other piece: Slacker had to create a player -- or, more accurately, a system -- for getting the Web personalized radio into a pocket-size device that didn't need to be connected.

The G2 is the result -- a sleek little player that looks a lot like many MP3 players on the market. You create radio stations on Slacker.com, plug the player into your computer, and Slacker service dumps hours worth of songs into the player. The player then works like streaming personal radio. You can't choose the songs or even see a menu of songs. The music plays, and you can skip or ban a song you don't like. If you start hearing the same songs over again, reconnect to your computer and a new batch will get downloaded.

The software end of the G2 could be better. It has WiFi, but I found it frustrating to connect. The software you have to download on your computer to synch with the player isn't all that helpful.

But the biggest problem, I think, is what to do with the player. It just seems like one too many gadgets. I found I like carrying around Slacker's radio service, but not not an extra player. But what if the service was available on my phone? Pandora is already one of the most popular apps on the iPhone. Slacker is coming to the BlackBerry. This seems like something that could and should spread across a broad range of phones.

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