Slacker Portable Player

The Slacker Portable Player is one method of consuming the Slacker Personal Radio service (review here). Without a doubt, the Portable Player is the best feature of Slacker. The ability to have custom internet radio stations but still take them with you where there isn't a connection is great. Since I ordered the Portable Player I haven't spent a day without it either in my pocket or in my car. I've nearly stopped burning my MP3 cd's to play in the car, and I'm not even sure where my mp3 player is.

The player is outfitted with a USB port and a wifi card. You use the USB port to charge the player and, on a windows computer, to sync up your music. Though, I almost exclusively use the wifi connection to sync. It works effortlessly, and works while still playing music. With the windows software, you are able to load up your own MP3's on the device (no encrypted wma's though). Or if you have a Slacker subscription, anything you've favorited will automatically show up in the on-demand music library on the device. The subscription isn't required, however. The Portable Player works just fine on the free plan, if you can stand the (very) occasional audio ad.

Ultimately I like the player enough that it's replaced everything else as my primary mp3 player. The only thing to keep in mind, is that the Portable Player is a good well built device, but with beta quality firmware. This means I do experience the occasional lock-up or jittery audio, but it's easily remedied and the Slacker tech support folks are phenomenal. The firmware releases have been fairly frequent and tend to fix the most common problems that are being posted on the forums. I'd still recommend a Slacker Portable Player to anyone that doesn't want to have to load their player with music (hence the name Slacker).