Hands-on with the Slacker Portable Player

Remember Slacker, the free service that lets you create your own streaming radio stations? Now the company has its Wi-Fi-enabled portable player on tap, and I got a little hands-on time here at CES.

The aptly named Slacker Portable Player (shipping this month in three versions: a 2GB model for $199, 4GB for $249, and 8GB for $299) isn't the slimmest music player I've ever seen, but it has a vibrant four-inch display, great for displaying album art and artist bios. It's not a touch screen, unfortunately, but a thin touch-sensitive strip along the side lets you scroll and select menu items, and there's a BlackBerry-type jog dial on the right-side spine of the player.

Pretty standard so far, but what really sets the Slacker player apart is the service itself; as you may recall, Slacker lets you set up, customize, and refresh music "stations" comprising thousands of artists from all four major labels. You can pick your favorite artists or tweak the song-selection settings to your liking—for example, you can request the most familiar songs or go for the fringe. The cool thing about Slacker is that it's free, although there are a couple of catches: you'll have to sit through one or two ads per hour (luckily, the commercials haven't quite been rolled out yet), and you can skip only six songs per hour, per station. Don't like the restrictions? For $7.50 a month, you get unlimited skips and no ads. Another new feature coming soon: a DJ who introduces the music (you can always turn the DJ off if you prefer).

What's really cool about the Slacker player is that once you've set up your radio stations, you can refresh your songs almost anywhere; all you need is a Wi-Fi connection, or you can even log onto Slacker from any PC and sync up via USB. Pretty cool, especially if you're someone who's always on the lookout for new tunes. Of course, if you're using the free version of Slacker, the commercials will get synced too (as will the DJ intros if you have them turned on).

As I mentioned before, the player isn't perfect; it's too bad the gorgeous display isn't touch-sensitive, there's no video playback (again, too bad given the jumbo screen), and there's no equalizer (although I'm told one will be added shortly via a firmware upgrade). But the ability to sync anywhere via Wi-Fi or USB is pretty sweet, and a Slacker rep told me that we could see cell phones and other portable devices with the Slacker service built in. (You can already listen to your Slacker stations over Logitech's wireless Squeezebox radio.)