Slacker Portable Player Video

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Created: 02/20/2008

Video description: The Slacker Portable Player isn't the best player for audiophiles and control freaks, but its excellent accompanying service makes it perfect for those who want their music provided to them with very minimal effort and cost.

Slacker Portable Player Video Transcript

[ Music ] ^M00:00:02

>> Hi, I'm Jasmine France, Senior associate editor for CNET.com and I'm here today with the Slacker Portable Player. Now, this is a very unique player and since that it's not really an MP3 player -- at least it's not only an MP3 player. Though, kind of the whole purpose of getting the Slacker Portable Player is to use it with the Slacker Web Service, which provides DJ updated radio stations that can be transferred to the player. So, it operates a little bit differently than a standard MP3 player. It's kind of like a portable satellite radio, but not quite. You get three choices for capacity and stations here. There is the 2-gigabyte version, which allows you to keep fifteen stations of your choosing on the device and that goes for $199. There's also a 4-gigabyte version with 25 stations and that is $249 and there's an 8-gigabyte version, which allows you to have 40 stations on here and that goes for $299. Now, when you have the stations on there, you also get some room left over for transferring your own MP3's and WMA files. You can do that using the Slacker software or using another software program, such as Rhapsody or Windows Media Player went to your content unto the player. You can access the stations just really easily and the front menus you can see it's a really nice big screen. This is actually will be a lovely screen for video, but it doesn't do anything like that. They're really just focusing on the audio for now. You can also create your own stations on the service and transfer them to this. Also you can shuttle through the different screens and you can read artists biographies as well as album reviews. Now, that's a new we haven't really seen on a portable player for album reviews. And it just gives you a whole integrated immersive experience on the player itself. As a device it's quite large. It doesn't have like, a super high quality feel to it. For the price you might expect that, but it is their fist step in the direction and I'm expecting it to really improve overtime. A couple of things I wanna point out on this player is the Heart and Ban buttons on the side. Now, this allows you to either ban a song completely from both the player and the service or you can favor it with the Heart and that means it will play more often and they'll remember that and that actually -- all the settings get transferred to the service as well. Another really useful feature on this player is the integrated Wi-Fi and that means you can update your stations on the fly if you're in-range or in a Wi-Fi hotspot or in your own network. Now, one important thing to note also about this player is that you can choose from two different services to use with the device and this is really, really key. And the first one is the basic service that Slacker offers and it's completely free. And it does of course ad-base, but they only play about 3 minutes worth of ads every hour, so that's not very ad at all considering you're in the whole service for free. Now you can upgrade to a Premium radio, which allows you to store songs and also you don't get advertising and you can skip as many times as you want. So, it might be worth it for some people, but definitely worth it for the free service. I mean, you don't see any other players out there right now that are offering this type of service completely for free, so it does kind of make up for the high price of the player. I'm Jasmine France and this has been the Slacker Portable Player. ^M00:02:49 [ Music ]

Slacker Portable Player Video

Slacker Portable Player Video Transcript

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