Internet radio station Slacker, which is built around customizable programming, plans to ship a portable player that can download tunes from the website over a Wi-Fi or wired connection on December 13.
The Slacker Portable Player is tied to a service that doesn't sell individual songs or albums, but rather streams music at no charge…if the user is willing to stomach ads. Lots and lots of ads. A premium version with out ads and added features is available for $7.50 a month.
Slacker hit over a million users in October and offers a huge catalog of music, which is divided into 100 categories (a.k.a. stations). Users choose the categories, and decide on the artists they wanna hear. The web application learns from your choices and adds new music based on your taste. You can also choose to only listen to the artists you pick.
The player comes with a four-inch screen for displaying artist bios and album art and a touch-screen scrollbar, and can play MP3 and WMA music files downloaded separately from a computer. The player comes in three sizes, 2Gbytes, 4Gbytes and 8Gbytes for $200, $250 and $300, respectively; and has a battery life of 10 hours.
"It's entertainment at the push of a button, rather than downloading separate music files and managing play lists," Jonathan Sasse, VP of marketing said.
And since the player is Internet enabled, Slacker has the option of pushing updates to the software, which could include support for video in the future. "It's something we're very interested in," Sasse said.
And you know what that means, kiddies….PORN!!!!
YahooNews.com: Slacker Music Service
