Hands-On With Slacker for iPhone

Slacker just announced today that the Slacker for iPhone application is now available in the iTunes application store.

The interface is beautiful. We quickly fired up the stations list and chose “Top Hits.” A big portion of the display is dedicated to the album art, with the station name displayed at the top of the application. Below the art, there’s a pause button, a skip key with the number of available skips left, the love and ban buttons, and a settings tab.

We love that you can skip songs simply by dragging your finger across the screen, and when you do this, the album art for the next song floats up to the surface of the display. If you slowly pull your finger along the display, you can see what song is up next. A double tap on the screen will pause or resume a track again.

With a full 3G connection, we noted that it took about 5 seconds for the next song to begin playing. We didn’t experience any interruptions while we listened to three different songs.

There are a few downsides to the iPhone version, however. Unlike the BlackBerry application, or browser-based Slacker player, you can’t save stations down to the phone for offline playback (even if you have a Slacker Premium account). That makes Slacker Basic (advertisements and a limit of six song skips) and Slacker Plus (no ads and unlimited skips for $3.99 per month) attractive offerings.

We like the interface of Slacker for iPhone better than Pandora, so far, and do like the recommended stations and hit lists. If you click an artist name, the application brings up information about the artist and the album currently playing.

Performance wise, the two are quite similar and we are able to listen to full songs without any skipping or pausing. Check it out for yourselves and let us know what you think.