Hands on with SanDisk's slotRadio (on sale today)

It was probably the most controversial product at CES 2009: SanDisk's slotRadio gadget -- and it's finally hitting the market today.

Even if you're not into the idea, the sell is intriguing: For $99.99 you get a small music player (with monochrome screen) pre-loaded with 1,000 "handpicked songs" from various top song lists on the Billboard charts. Additional cards -- generally with more focused genres -- are $39.99 for 1,000 songs. At 4 cents a song, you simply won't get a deal like that anywhere else (not legally, anyway).

The catch: The songs are delivered in the order slotRadio desires, a lot like a radio service. You can skip a song you don't like, but you can't select a song from the list (or even browse the list at all) on demand, and you can't go back once a song has already played. You have to wait for it to rotate its way back to the front of the queue to hear it again.

It's a terrible solution for music tinkerers obsessed with bitrates, playlist minutiae, and high-res album art, but if you're a casual listener who'd otherwise be listening to the radio -- replete with its chatterhead DJs and endless ads -- slotRadio is a surprisingly appealing device.

Let's put aside the hardware for a moment and consider what really matters here: the song selection. Overall I was pretty happy with what slotRadio served up. But hey, decide for yourself. Here's a random four songs from three of the seven channels:

On the Rock channel -- Tom Petty's "American Girl, "The Who's "I Can't Explain," Heart's "Barracuda," and Counting Crows' "Rain King."

On the Contemporary channel -- The Fray's "Over My Head," Dashboard Confessional's "Stolen," Ne-Yo's "Closer," and Coldplay's unavoidable "Viva La Vida."

On the Alternative channel -- The All-American Rejects' "It Ends Tonight," Local H's "Mayonnaise And Malaise," Oleander's "Why I'm Here," and Angels and Airwaves' "The Adventure."

Other channels, including the more-vague Chillout and Workout channels generally did the job they advertised, and the Country and R&B/Hip Hop channels both felt appropriate for their target audiences.

Use is pretty brain-dead straightforward (at least once you find the skip button, which is hard to see on the right side of the device). The only other controls are volume, channel switcher buttons (the large arrows on the face), and an on/off/FM radio switch -- so you can listen to the regular radio when you get tired of all these tunes. The animated display is nothing special, but it's nice to have the name of the track and the artist visible.

Quality is fine but not particularly notable. Of possible interest: When you switch channels, each channel remembers what it was playing last, picking back up where you switched off before. I didn't formally benchmark battery life, but it's comparable to other flash-based players and played without dying, off and on, for an entire day.

The package includes the player and the base 1,000-song microSD card, large and small carrying cases, earbuds, a USB cable, and a USB-to-A/C wall adapter, giving you two charging options. For 100 bucks, it's a pretty good value I have to admit.

Sure, I'm not the target audience for this device -- I like to add new music to my playlist all the time, shuffle stuff around, and always have a huge chunk of my library with me. But if I was shopping for a music player for one of my parents -- or looking for something I could take to the gym and not worry about having to bring it home every night -- the slotRadio is an awfully tantalizing device. Check it out in person before you dismiss it!