Slacker Radio app for iPhone goes live

Now you can listen to, rate, and tweak your custom Slacker music stations on your iPhone, provided you're in range of a data connection.

Word of the free streaming music app (available today on iTunes) leaked last week during CES, and so far, I'm pretty impressed with the finished product—indeed, Slacker Radio for the iPhone makes for a worthy competitor to the wildly popular (and newly updated) Pandora Radio and Last.fm apps.

I've written about Slacker several times before (check out my review of the latest Wi-Fi-enabled Slacker hardware player, as well as the now-available BlackBerry client), and I'm a big fan of Slacker's ability to let you create and adjust (endlessly, if you so choose) your custom radio stations; all those features are present and accounted for in the iPhone version.

Creating new Slacker stations on the iPhone is similar to the Pandora and Last.fm tracks—just search for and select a song, album, or artist, and you've got a new station. What I like about the Slacker iPhone app, though, is that you can drill down and tweak the settings on your stations; for example, you can add more familiar or fringe songs into the mix, stay with artists you know or find new ones, stick to current tracks or dip into oldies, or even add commentary from a pre-recorded Slacker DJ.

The Slacker iPhone app also lets you peek ahead to see what song is up next (nice touch), as well as browse scores of pre-programmed Slacker stations.

The free version of Slacker only lets you skip six songs an hour (as does Pandora), and you might hear a commercial every hour or so. (Pandora restricts its commercials to visual ads within the interface.) Upgrading to the $3.99/month "Radio Plus" service removes the song-skipping limit and the ads.

My one complaint about Slacker for the iPhone: It doesn't save and cache tunes for offline listening, as the BlackBerry Slacker client does. That's a bummer for those of us who use our iPhones on planes and subways.

Now, I could launch into a streaming-radio dust-up here between Slacker, Pandora, and Last.fm—but you know what? No need. All these top-notch (and slightly different) apps are free, and they can live and play together on a single iPhone. I've got all three installed, and I'm keeping 'em.

Correction: In my original post, I wrote that you'd need to subscribe to the $7.50 Slacker Premium service to remove the six-skip song limit and advertisements on the iPhone app; in fact, you only need the "Radio Plus" upgrade for $3.99 a month. Sorry for the goof.