Slacker Mobile

Last week Slacker announced the Slacker Mobile application for Blackberry smartphones. I downloaded it almost immediately to find out it is one of the must have applications for the device. Slacker is a music service, similar in nature to the Pandora, mentioned here a number of times. Both stream personalized music and both have been available for the iPhone for some time. But the difference Slacker gives is station caching. So you can create your personalized radio stations and pre - cache some or all of them (in my case the Slacker Mobile says it can cache 53 stations on the 16GB micro SD card, half occupied by songs I transferred there from iTunes). 53 stations is a lot.

The idea of caching is fantastic for mobile personalized digital radios. Cellular data connectivity is still too slow (in many places where 3G coverage does not exist), too expensive (when roaming) or non existent in places you would like to listen to music (like a plane). Of course both Pandora and Slacker know your music preferences, so it is conceptually pretty straightforward to push a pack of songs to a device you will listen to while being off-line. I have no idea why Pandora has not prepared such functionality, but on the other hand the move by Slacker is brilliant, as it suddenly opens an entire new market for them: portable connected music players.

Technically the application has professional looks and behaves as expected with two exceptions I would like to focus on:

• Station caching can be done only via USB connection by means of running an application on the host PC. This approach is flawed. Many Blackberries have Wi-Fi (my Bold has one) that idles most of the day and, especially, most of the night when the device sits silently in the dock charging batteries and displaying a clock. That idle time could have easily been used to refill the cache with new music automatically. This way every morning I would pick up the Blackberry full of new music to make my day. Instead in the evening I have to manually connect the Berry via USB to my laptop, launch the Slacker Sync application and wait until it finishes its job. Let us hope Slacker will makes idle Wi-Fi synchronization available soon.
• Some people report it works over Wi-Fi connection, some it does not. Seems the answer is simple, but the workaround requires some investments. Slacker, like Pandora, restricts the availability of the service to the United States only. And guess what that means... If your external IP address is in the US, it will work, if not in the US, it won't. Sure, I had this issue with Pandora too. But with Slacker Mobile it is even more painful. Imagine you are American and you subscribe to it to have music on the go. Then you cache some stations, board a plane to Europe, listening to the cached music on board. You land in London or Paris or Warsaw... You know streaming music over cellular network while roaming will cost you some $100 a song, so you never do that. But when you arrive at your hotel, you log on the Wi-Fi network just to see the Slacker service cannot serve you, as you are not in the US... Of course without moving an inch, you could turn on your 3G cellular data and keep on streaming for roughly $1000 an hour. This is because cellular data is likely connected to the Internet where your home network is, so the external IP (the one Slacker can check) will be in the US. My solution to this problem has been relatively easy to implement, as I already have a VPN tunnel configured on my DFL-800 router. So it was enough to add Slacker's IP to the group handled by the VPN connection, and suddenly all my LAN devices connecting to Slacker servers appeared as they were located in the US. That did the trick and the Blackberry started playing music.

Late Friday night I selected a few Slacker radio stations and configured them as "cached". Then left it connected to fill the cache and Saturday morning boarded a bus for a snowboarding trip to the mountains. On the bus I was able to fully enjoy and discover new music stored on the Blackberry as cached radio stations. Not paying too much attention whether I was within cellular coverage or not. Cached mode definitely has been the missing link between personalized Internet radio and mobile devices. Slacker is the champion. The breakthrough application for the Blackberry. It works fantastic at home and in the office too. Thanks to really unbelievable stereo speakers built in the Blackberry Bold, able to fill the room with rich sound. The charging pod has been perfect for the night bedside mode, converting the Blackberry into an alarm clock. The same pod is now perfect for using the Berry as a desktop radio. My last wish for today may be connecting the Blackberry alarm clock with the Slacker Mobile, so I can be waken up by the sound of my favorite music.