Slacker made some curious decisions in designing its portable, which is larger and chunkier than, say, an iPod classic. Slacker assures that customers won't experience constant bombardment of upgrade exhortations as its business model works well even with the free tier of service and a player purchase. Slacker has a premium service available for about $7 per month that eliminates the commercials and allows an unlimited number of song skips. While the Sansa Connect relied on a premium music subscription to transfer tracks to the device, the basic tier of Slacker service - which includes two commercials and up to six skips per hour - is free. 'Filling up' a station from scratch took about 10 minutes, but partial refills are faster. Upon connecting to the Slacker service via WiFi or a PC's USB port (the latter connection method does not support the Mac), the Slacker Portable caches hours of music for each of these stations. One nice touch is that a device ordered from Slacker comes pre-populated with any stations you have set up on the site. The device comes in three capacities that are billed as storing a different number of stations, which are either genres preset by the internet radio service available at, or customized for the user based on a particular artist. MP3 files can be loaded onto the device, but that feature is more of an afterthought. While that device was billed primarily as an MP3 player that boasted tight integration with the Yahoo! Music Unlimited service (now shuttering), the Slacker Portable is labeled as a 'personal radio'. The Slacker Portable picks up where last year's promising Sansa Connect left off. And a fourth are XM and Sirius, which now appear on track to merge in part due to the kind of competition that the Slacker Portable will ultimately provide.

A third is the traditional consumer electronics industry for which it portends a connected future. Another is the bevy of online internet music sites such as Pandora, Last.fm, Finetune and others, to which it represents the leap from the beb to portable entertainment. One is the crop of portable MP3 players, to which the device's service represents free, fresh music on the go in exchange for user control of track selection. The Slacker Portable is the proverbial elephant being inspected by blind men.

Slacker tech n9ne mp3 download