In the week or so I’ve been evaluating Sprint’s rendition of the HTC Hero, I’ve bemoaned the lack of Slacker Radio — one of my iPhone must-haves. Fortunately, review timing is fortuitous… and Slacker just joined Pandora in the Android Market. It’s the same music experience you know and love, yet accompanied by less polished visuals and additional advertising. The few bucks for a Slacker Premium subscription ($48/yr), which frees you of all ads and provides unlimited skips, isn’t unreasonable at all. However, I’ve fallen in love with whole-home audio solution Sonos… and Slacker is MIA. Meaning my sub will probably go to Pandora. I prefer Slacker’s station/genre programming over the Pandora Music Genome Project analysis and matching, but Pandora’s still available in more places. Additionally, unlike Slacker’s own G2 hardware (being phased out) and their Blackberry app, the Android Slacker solution does not offer local track archiving for offline playback.
Viva Consumer choice!!!
Would love to see a proper ZNF shoot out of the Android music services/subscriptions.
Slacker vs.
Pandora vs.
Amazon vs.
Last FM vs.
???
Todd, don’t you occasionally write for ZNF and own an Android developer handset? Get on that shootout! ;) Slacker v Pandora v Last.FM would be a good streaming service comparison, whereas Amazon is track purchasing option and somewhat different.
I decided to run back to pandora after a couple years with slacker. The track selection for local storage is really not wide enough to make it feel like a true radio station — I’ve already heard a ton of songs on pandora that I missed. Plus, pandora is /everywhere/.
Scott- Interesting to hear that you’ve found a wider selection on Pandora. You may be right about overall breadth. But I’m still more impressed with Slacker’s categorization and customization. And I’ve had a lot of success saving songs that I like on local storage. My music tastes may be less eclectic, but I rarely come across a song I can’t save. I still think the offline archiving is a killer app. Hope they get it to more devices!
Q: “Todd, don’t you occasionally write for ZNF and own an Android developer handset?…”
A: Yes, and yes.
:P
“The track selection for local storage is really not wide enough to make it feel like a true radio station”
Don’t you mean, “The track selection for local storage is really not wide enough and that makes it feel too much like a true radio station”
I think any of these services outdoes 95% of FM and satellite radio stations.