Digital Home Thoughts: Slacker Portable: Better Late Than Never?

"Well it’s here (almost). Although promised by the end of the summer, the Slacker Portable is now available for pre-order and should ship in mid-December. You shouldn’t think of it as an MP3 player, per se, although you can load MP3 and WMA files onto the device. Think of it more as a personal portable radio. You listen to songs and rate them. The ones you hate never show up again and the ones you love show up more often. Music is transferred to the player over a Wi-Fi connection and artist/song biographical information is displayed on the 4-inch color screen (it’s not a touchscreen, though). I had high, high hopes for this device. I suppose part of me is still hanging on to the possibility that it might still be all it’s cracked up to be. My main concern is the price, however. The cheapest player is $200 and that’s for 2GB of storage. The 4GB and 8GB versions are $250 and $300, respectively."



While the concept of the device is great - i.e. more of the type of music that you like - I am not sure that it will necessarily succeed. For one thing, it needs a Wi-Fi connection to report back your preferences (wish it was using some other, longer range, mode of communication). Second, the price is significantly greater than that of the same capacity Zune or iPod. Third, in order to not listen to the ads, you have to pay an additional $8 per month. And finally, there is the 10 hours of battery life. While the form factor and the screen size are certainly appealing, I am not so sure I can look past all those negatives.