I’ve played with it briefly, and the experience has been fantastic so far. Because Apple does not allow caching like RIM does with the BlackBerry, the content is streaming—but the music plays back well even when you are on EDGE (and the coverflow-style switching was smooth). The app is free, but if you don’t have a Plus subscription you will have to deal with the occasional advertisement and a skipping/request limit.

Features:

Slacker Mobile for iPhone:
• Free music library featuring millions of songs
• High-quality stereo playback from any wireless connection
• Over 100 professionally programmed genre stations
• Create custom artist stations
• Fine tune stations to play more of the music you like
• 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 the songs and artists you don’t like

AU: Unsurprisingly, this one’s not on the AU iTunes store…

[Slacker on iTunes]

Not at all far, as it turns out. MobileCrunch reports that the release could come as soon as tomorrow, which is fantastic news. If you’re not familiar with Slacker, it’s an almost too-good-to-be-true online radio site that enables Last.fm and Pandora-like streaming, in conjunction with more tradition radio-style stations and easily controllable user-made stations.

As with the Slacker standalone player, the station content will be stored locally on the BlackBerry or iPhone, meaning that you don’t need a solid 3G or Wi-Fi connection to play back your music. It’s safe to say that the iPhone version, like the Blackberry app, will be free, but some features will be disabled unless you have a full Slacker subscription, a fact that holds true across the Slacker range of products. [MobileCrunch—Thanks, Daren!]

The Price: US$200 for 25-station 4GB, and US$250 for the 40-station 8GB unit. The free service is ad-supported and allows six skips per hour, while the premium service costs about US$10/month and is ad-free, offers unlimited skips and the ability to save songs to the device.

The Verdict: The Slacker G2 looks a million times better than its first-gen sibling. The older player was bigger and thicker than a deck of cards, with poorly placed buttons and a capacitive touch strip that felt somewhat cheap. The G2 trims the fat from the device, leaving a screen just big enough to show album art, and controls that are far more intuitive than its predecessor. The 2.4″ display is clear, text is very readable, menus are simple and it’s about as tall and thick as an iPod dock (but much lighter), a good size for the hand.

For this portable Pandora-style player to succeed, it needs two things. The first thing is, it needs a great selection of songs, tailored to the user’s tastes. In this respect, it’s awesome—even pre-programmed stations (think satellite radio rather than Pandora) have a wide ranging and thoughtful collection of artists, and stick mostly to singles or fan favourites so you don’t get many strange deep cuts. Custom built stations (which you have to create in the web player) are even better. In both cases, you can favourite or ban song suggestions that you don’t like, but if you design a station with more than 200 songs, you won’t get any outside suggestions (though you probably no longer count as a true “slacker”).

The other thing the G2 absolutely needs is a solid connection for refreshing stations. Sadly, this is where it falls short. A full refresh took almost two hours; stations took at least 10 or 15 minutes apiece to download. Adding a custom station for the first time took forever, and so did refreshing stations that I listened to often, favoriting and banning many songs. You can’t refresh one station at a time—only all stations at once—and you can’t create stations directly on the device either. I’d love to see these two things in a firmware update. Slacker may have shown us its more viable future in smartphone software with its recent BlackBerry announcement. Still, with some software tweaks and better networking, the company could make the G2 a decent alternative for those who fear convergence. [Slacker]

[FCC]

That’s right, in living video, our buddy John Falcone explains the Wi-Fi-powered system, and notes that, aside from DRM protected content, the Squeezebox Duet gets at “any music, anywhere” including stuff from Rhapsody, Slacker, and Pandora, plus internet radio and podcasts.

Falcone was particularly excited about the Squeeze network, which lets you manage all your music online, and says that because of the open-source and Linux-friendly nature of Squeeze, the “tweaker or hacker type” will have lots of fun.

In the written portion of the review, Falcone mentioned that “it lacks the iPod’s speed-sensitive ability to quickly jump up and down through long lists,” something that scares me a bit because I have lots of music and very little patience. Also in the prose, Sonos is mentioned as an expensive rival good for people who want to fill five or more rooms with sound, or people who already own Sonos.

In the end, Falcone says he “couldn’t be more pleased with it,” which is good news for those of us unwilling to start at US$1,000 for a wireless audio system, and bad news for the good people over at Sonos. Sorry dudes! [CNet]

Among the things they liked about the player included the supported artworks, band biographies, ability to store Wi-Fi keys and the option to have access to a free, or paid, enhanced music services. The Slacker Portable also auto refreshed channels when it detected a trusted network, as well as automatically refreshing while recharging.

What didn’t go down so well was the buggy touch sensitive strip; the jog dial was far better, and was used instead. The free mode meant only 6 songs could be skipped per hour. as well as the terrible obligation to listen to adverts during your music time. As the stations are cached for the times you are out of range of a wireless network, there is little room left on the player for your own tunes. (Either 500MB, 1.5GB or 4GB, depending on the capacity of the player chosen.) Content cannot be downloaded from a Mac, and the 10-hour battery life was not great.

The folks at Wired easily looked past the Slacker Portable’s shortcomings, and we think we might follow suit. Now, why is our review unit taking so long to get here? Damn slacking postal service. (Sorry.) Check out the full review, as well as some unboxing pics by hitting the link. [Wired]