You know a music player is revolutionary when it features several design issues that would’ve meant death for any other device but it’s still able to rise above its flaws due to the radically different (and decidedly cool) approach it takes to digital music. Such was the original Slacker Portable, a beefy player that featured a wonky touchstrip that was more frustrating than helpful.
Still, its integration with the slick Slacker Personal Radio service, which supplied users with an unlimited supply of free music, enabled us to overlook the design faux paus. Now Slacker is back with the Slacker Portable G2, the smaller, lighter successor to the original Slacker Portable that bests the G1 player in nearly every aspect.
Small, Intuitive Design
Measuring 3.4 x 2.0 x 0.5 inches and weighing a barely-there 2.6 ounces, the Slacker Portable G2 truly lives up to its name. It fits comfortably in hand, and slides easily into a shirt or pants pocket. Gone are the ill-positioned buttons of the first-generation device; the Slacker Portable G2 has a far more intuitive control scheme that is conducive to one-hand button manipulation. Housed on the right side of the player is a BlackBerry-style scroll wheel (with which we navigated menus and songs quickly), and a Home button. The player’s face has several easy-to-reach buttons: Play/Pause, Favorite, Ban, Skip Forward, and Skip Back (which only works with AAC, MP3, and WMA songs in your library). Our only gripe is that the volume keys are located on top of the device, which can be tricky to press in a pinch.
The 2.4-inch (320 x 240-pixel) display is bright and colorful but wasn’t particularly sharp when showcasing album art and had narrow viewing angles. Scrolling down from the main viewing area reveals your stations, playlists, digital music library, system settings, and Wi-Fi connections. Like the original Slacker Portable, you can also view artist info (by clicking on an artist’s name) and read album reviews (by clicking on album art), but their layouts aren’t as visually impressive as when they appeared on the first player’s massive 4-inch screen. Still, we’d gladly accept a smaller screen for the G2’s portability.
Basic and Premium Accounts
The G2 operates in conjunction with Slacker’s online service, which has more than 2 million tracks in its library. Unlike traditional MP3 players, you don’t have to load songs individually onto the device. After creating an account on Slacker.com, we created stations by typing in the names of some of our favorite artists. You can also select preset music channels.
You fine-tune these stations by telling the service if you want to discover more artists, popular songs, and specify how up-to-date the selections should be. But this can only be done online. On the device, customizing your station is voting songs up or down with the Ban and Favorite buttons.
Users are offered two options for accessing Slacker’s deep well of music. The Basic account lets you listen to as much music as you’d like, but you can’t save tracks to the player for anytime playback or skip more than six songs per station per hour, and you have to listen to one 20-second audio advertisement per hour. Upgrading to a Premium account ($7.50 per month) eliminates these limitations.
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