In case you haven’t heard of Slacker Radio, check out this CrackBerry Idol Review of Slacker Radio to get all the details. Good luck to everyone!!!

Source: Crackberry.com

See the store at: Amazon Wireless Store

Slacker station caching, an exclusive feature for BlackBerry smartphones, enables mobile listeners to store favorite stations on a memory card, allowing Slacker music service to play without a network connection while boosting battery life up to 5 times that of streaming playback and enhancing application performance. In addition, BlackBerry smartphone enthusiasts can enjoy Slacker Personal Radio while doing other tasks such as emailing, instant messaging or web browsing.

The groundbreaking Slacker music service enables listeners to enjoy Personal Radio stations and hear their favorite music without ever having to manage playlists or research new artists. Included in the Slacker application for BlackBerry smartphones are detailed artist bios and album reviews for each song that is played, providing the ultimate resource for music discovery. The Slacker Mobile application works with the free Slacker Basic Radio service, along with Slacker Radio Plus and Slacker Premium Radio subscription offerings.

Slacker Mobile for BlackBerry smartphones offers:
– Free music library featuring millions of songs
– High-quality stereo playback from cached stations and all streaming wireless connections
– Over 100 professionally programmed genre stations
– Create custom artist stations
– Station caching for music playback anywhere, greatly improved battery life and accelerated application performance
– Multi-tasking – listen to music while doing email
– View artist biographies and photos
– View album art and reviews
– “Peek Ahead” artist and album preview
– Pause and skip songs
– Rate songs as favorites
– Ban songs and artists you don’t like

Pricing and Availability
The Slacker Personal Radio Mobile application for BlackBerry smartphones is available immediately as a free download by visiting Slacker.com from your BlackBerry web browser or visit www.slacker.com/blackberry for more details.

Source: http://www.chipchick.com/2009/01/ces_2009_slacker_blackberry.html

Over the next several days, customers using the BlackBerry Storm smartphone will see the Slacker Radio application icon appear on their handsets’ home screens as it is pushed over-the-air. The Slacker Radio icon gives customers one-click access to a free version of one of the most popular personalized radio services available today.

This version of Slacker Radio also connects to V CAST Music, combining this exciting music application with Verizon Wireless’ industry-leading mobile music service. When a song is being played using Slacker Radio and is one of the more than 4.5 million available in the V CAST Music with Rhapsody catalog, a V CAST icon will appear on the screen that will let customers easily purchase that track while it continues playing on the smartphone.

“Verizon Wireless is making it even easier for customers who want to experience music on their smartphones to find Slacker Radio, then connecting them directly to V CAST Music so they can take that music with them wherever they go,” said Ed Ruth, director of partner management for Verizon. “This combination is great for both serious music lovers and casual fans who want to listen to music when the mood strikes them.”

“With the largest music library of any personal radio app, Slacker Radio makes your BlackBerry Storm smartphone the ultimate music player,” said Jonathan Sasse, senior vice president of marketing at Slacker. “By integrating with V CAST Music, Slacker listeners will now have the ability to easily purchase music as they listen to their favorite stations.”

The Slacker Radio application provides BlackBerry Storm smartphone users in the United States with a personalized music discovery and listening experience, pulling from more than 100 expert-programmed Slacker stations, over 10,000 artist stations or a nearly unlimited number of the listener’s own custom-created stations. Features include station caching to storage memory, an intuitive interface optimized for touch operation with support for vertical and horizontal orientation, as well as “peek ahead,” allowing the listener to see a preview of the next artist and album in their stations’ rotations.

Customers who don’t want the Slacker Radio icon on their home screens can hide it or move it to a folder.

Slacker Radio is included with Email and Web for BlackBerry plans, which begin at $29.99 when added to any Nationwide voice plan. For more information about products and services from Verizon Wireless, visit a Verizon Wireless Communications Store, call 1-800-2 JOIN IN or visit www.verizonwireless.com.

About Verizon Wireless

Verizon Wireless operates the nation’s most reliable and largest wireless voice and data network, serving more than 86.6 million customers. Headquartered in Basking Ridge, N.J., with more than 86,000 employees nationwide, Verizon Wireless is a joint venture of Verizon Communications (NYSE: VZ) and Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) (LSE: VOD) . For more information, visit www.verizonwireless.com. To preview and request broadcast-quality video footage and high-resolution stills of Verizon Wireless operations, log on to the Verizon Wireless Multimedia Library at www.verizonwireless.com/multimedia.

About Slacker, Inc.

Slacker is the world’s first Personal Radio company offering “Your Radio Everywhere.” Slacker allows music lovers to play highly personalized music online at the Slacker web site or on the go with Slacker Personal Radio players and mobile phones. Visit www.slacker.com for more information.

The BlackBerry and RIM families of related marks, images and symbols are the exclusive properties and trademarks of Research In Motion Limited.

SOURCE Verizon Wireless

Company News On-Call: http://www.prnewswire.com/comp/094251.html
Website: http://www.verizonwireless.com
Website: http://www.slacker.com

LAS VEGAS – January 8, 2009 – Slacker, Inc. today announced the availability of the free Slacker Mobile application for BlackBerry® smartphones from Research In Motion (RIM) (Nasdaq: RIMM; TSX: RIM). BlackBerry smartphone users* can now hear their favorite Slacker radio stations wherever they go, whether they are connected to a wireless network or not – a Slacker Mobile feature exclusive to BlackBerry smartphones. The application, which is compatible with BlackBerry® Device Software version 4.3 and higher is available as a free download by visiting Slacker.com from your BlackBerry smartphone.

The Slacker Mobile application provides BlackBerry smartphone users in the U.S. with a personalized music discovery and listening experience pulling from over 100 expert- programmed Slacker stations, over 10,000 artist stations or a nearly unlimited number of the listener’s own custom-created stations.

Slacker station caching, an exclusive feature for BlackBerry smartphones, enables mobile listeners to store favorite stations on a memory card, allowing Slacker music service to play without a network connection while boosting battery life up to 5 times that of streaming playback and enhancing application performance. In addition, BlackBerry smartphone enthusiasts can enjoy Slacker Personal Radio while doing other tasks such as emailing, instant messaging or web browsing.

The groundbreaking Slacker music service enables listeners to enjoy Personal Radio stations and hear their favorite music without ever having to manage playlists or research new artists. Included in the Slacker application for BlackBerry smartphones are detailed artist bios and album reviews for each song that is played, providing the ultimate resource for music discovery. The Slacker Mobile application works with the free Slacker Basic Radio service, along with Slacker Radio Plus and Slacker Premium Radio subscription offerings.

“Slacker Mobile makes your BlackBerry smartphone the ultimate personal radio player,” said Dennis Mudd, CEO of Slacker. “And because of our caching technology, BlackBerry owners can play their personal radio stations everywhere, even on subways and planes, with much better battery life and faster song skipping than is possible with streaming stations.”

“Our new BlackBerry smartphones provide truly impressive audio and video performance that allows the smartphones to serve as powerful and conveniently accessible personal entertainment devices for consumers and business users alike,” said Jeff McDowell, Vice President, Global Alliances at Research In Motion. “With access to millions of songs and easily customized programming, it’s no surprise that people are excited by this new application.”

Slacker Personal Radio, available online at www.Slacker.com, enables listeners to personalize over 100 professionally programmed stations or create, edit and share their own Personal Radio stations. Slacker listeners also have easy access to artist profiles, album reviews and cover art on the web, with the Slacker G2 portable and now on BlackBerry smartphones.

Slacker Mobile for BlackBerry smartphones offers:

* Free music library featuring millions of songs
* High-quality stereo playback from cached stations and all streaming wireless connections
* Over 100 professionally programmed genre stations
* Create custom artist stations
* Station caching for music playback anywhere, greatly improved battery life and accelerated application performance
* Multi-tasking – listen to music while doing email
* View artist biographies and photos
* View album art and reviews
* “Peek Ahead” artist and album preview
* Pause and skip songs
* Rate songs as favorites
* Ban songs and artists you don’t like

Source: http://crackberry.com/ces-2009-slacker-available-blackberry-smartphones

The application will be available over the air in the following days so you should definitely get it if you’re into mobile music.

Source: http://www.mobilewhack.com/verizon-and-slacker-bring-music-to-your-blackberry-storm/

Apparently we were not the only ones to notice the power of Slacker, because Verizon Wireless just announced that they would “push” the Slacker player to every single Blackberry Storm. This means millions of Storm owners will have access to the awesome radio channels in the Slacker lineup, as well as the ability to create their own personalized channel.

The Slacker player for the Blackberry Storm even lets users purchase tracks from the V Cast Music store. One of the most powerful features of Slacker for the Blackberry is the ability to cache music to the storage card, which means listeners won’t be without music when they are outside the coverage area. Of course, since Verizon offers the largest 3G network in the nation, this means you’ll need to be on a plane or in a tunnel to take advantage of cached streaming!

Expect to see the Slacker player icon show up on your Blackberry Storm in the next couple of days, but you can of course already take advantage of the service by heading to Slacker.com and checking it out in your browser.

http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=104381284206&h=mI_qE&u=0sKSO&ref=nf

The Slacker Mobile for BlackBerry client is available now for free. The Slacker G2 portable player device was announced last Fall, but now you can use your BlackBerry, with software version 4.3 or higher, to listen to over 100 programmed Slacker stations. The application has the following features:

* Free music library featuring millions of songs
* High-quality stereo playback from cached stations and all streaming wireless connections
* Over 100 professionally programmed genre stations
* Create custom artist stations
* Station caching for music playback anywhere, greatly improved battery life and accelerated application performance
* Multi-tasking; listen to music while doing email
* View artist biographies and photos
* View album art and reviews
* “Peek Ahead” artist and album preview
* Rate songs as favorites
* Ban songs and artists you don’t like

I don’t have a BlackBerry to test this out on right now, but will be checking out people’s experiences with the service to see how it performs.

When I did have a BlackBerry Bold, the streaming service I used was FlyCast. FlyCast is available now for BlackBerry and iPhone devices and today’s announcement brings the service to the T-Mobile G1/Google Android and your PC or Mac desktop. The Android application will appear shortly on the Android Market and I’ll be sure to download, install, and evaluate it here as soon as it becomes available. You can download the Mac/PC version now and stream content for free. FlyCast also enhanced upgraded their program guide, enhanced 300 stations with unlimited song skipping capability, added Facebook Connect functionality, integrated AccuWeather.com data and added support for broadcasters to deploy streams in AAC+ and Windows Media formats.

Source: Matthew Miller (ZDNET) is an avid mobile device enthusiast who works during the day as a professional naval architect in Seattle. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.

From the BlackBerry’s menu key, you’ll be able to view stations, plus artist and album info. You can also reset your messages or the entire account, and shut down the Slacker app, which will otherwise conveniently continue to play in the background while you do other tasks.

Surprisingly, multitasking is only this application’s second best feature. Honors go to its ability on BlackBerry to cache stations as they play and store cached stations on a Micro SD card. The process of plugging your device into your computer to get Slacker Radio to recognize the cached stations is an unfortunate and sometimes inconvenient step we hope its developers will overcome, but other than having to be in short range of a computer, it at least is painless. When Wi-Fi wobbles and 3G cuts out, clicking on a cached station is a windfall for any serious listener. Subscribers to Slacker’s Radio Plus service also get the benefit of the lyrics tab, provided by Slacker Radio Partner LyricFind where lyrics are available.

Now if we could just send custom station creations to our friends, we’d stick a fork in this app and call it done.

First Things First.  You need to upgrade your Blackberry operating system to version 4.5 or newer.  Not only will this allow you to download the Slacker application, but it will make your Blackberry better with things such as HTML e-mail.

Once you have accomplished this, the rest, like anything else brought to you by Slacker, is a breeze.  Simply direct your Blackberry to the link provided at Slacker, hit download, and shortly thereafter you will have the full Slacker service streaming on your Blackberry device.

The Slacker Blackberry service is intuitive, and even has the Slacker functions you have come to expect.  You can ”Love” songs, “Ban” them, and even find great new content.  There is buffering at times when listening live, so you may want to cache a few of your favorite channels onto the micro SD card in your Blackberry.  Caching stations makes them more seamless, and means that buffering or cell signal will not be a worry.

In some ways, the interface on the Blackberry even outdoes the existing portable.  I like the way the album covers are staged on the Blackberry service, and the channel organization is also quite nice.  The company groups together channels into categories, and has your own channels and recently played sitting right there at your fingertips.

The Slacker for Blackberry carries no additional charge.  This means whether you are a basic, Plus, or Premium listener, you are not going to see Slacker billing additional charges to you.  Data plans between cell carriers may vary, so check out your cell plan before jamming out for hours on end.  Cached stations are stored on the device, so even those that have limited data plans can take Slacker portable with relative ease, and you can enjoy the service as you commute!

If you have not tried Slacker on the Blackberry, get off your butt and download the application.  You will be glad you did.