Free Internet Radio in Your Pocket

The Internet offers a growing range of free music services, from Napster, which allows you to stream albums at no cost, tailored to your taste, to sites like Pandora, Slacker, Finetune, AOL Radio, and others that let you create your channels that select music based on your preferences, and even adjust their programming on the fly as you tell the service what you like and don't like among the selections they've delivered.

Until now, listening to streamed music away from your computer has often meant paying a subscription, typically $15 a month, to online services like Napster and Rhapsody or the satellite radio services, XM and Sirius. You can then stuff a compatible portable player—sometimes a regular MP3 player but often a proprietary player you need to buy—with the service's music.

But Slacker is now one of the first online music services to offer portability without a subscription. You do need to buy a proprietary player, one of three new Slacker portable players launching later this month for $200 to $300. But you can then store free music from the site's 2-million-song library, either capturing it from their 100 channels or from the customized channels you've created at Slacker.com.

You can load new content via a Wi-Fi connection or a USB port. The players measure 2.77 in. x .67 in. x 4.2 in—not the smallest we've seen, but small enough to slide into most pockets comfortably—and have large, 4-in.-diag. LCD screens (not touch-sensitive) and capacities range from 1,500 to 4,000 radio songs, depending on the model. The players also reserve some storage space for your own collection, but you can only use it if you pay Slacker $7.50 a month. The fee also . Paying Slacker $7.50 a month adds the ability to save individual tracks streamed over the radio channels for on-demand playback. This premium service also filters out third-party ads and enables you to skip songs on radio channels for an unlimited number of times, rather than the maximum of six skips per hour allowed with the free service. Claimed battery life for all three units is about 10 hours.

[Jan. 18, 2008 UPDATE: We clarified the features and capabilities offered through Slacker's $7.50 per month service. —Ed.]

The players' vital statistics:

• The 2GB, 15-station player ($200) holds about 1,500 radio songs, with 500MB of spare storage for your own songs (allowing about 125 to be stored).
• The 4GB, 25-station player ($250) holds about 2,500 radio songs, with 1.5GB of spare storage for your own songs (allowing about 375 to be stored).
• The 8GB, 40-station player ($300) holds about 4,000 radio songs, with 4GB of spare storage for your own songs (allowing about 1,000 to be stored).

Sound quality during our noisy showroom-floor demonstration at CES 2008 seemed okay, comparable to that of a typical MP3 player. The controls, including a side-mounted scroll bar for traversing the players' generous screen, were easy to master. We'll have more details about the Slacker Personal Radio experience after the players are available later this month. We'll also look at a new iPod-like portable player called the Ibiza Rhapsody, which lets you stream and store music and other content from the subscription Rhapsody service via a Wi-Fi connection.

—Mike Gikas