Video Hands-On with Slacker Application for BlackBerry

This morning we learned that Slacker, the popular internet radio device and application, is now available on BlackBerry. So we chased Slacker down for a hands-on with this service, and we were immediately impressed.

The application ran pretty well on a BlackBerry 8820 ($224.99): the spacebar can be used to pause tracks, and you can skip, heart (favorite) or make sure a song never plays again at the touch of a button. The software uses Slacker’s caching capabilities to sideload music from your computer. An 8GB card can hold about 40 stations with 100 songs per station, or a total of 1,000 songs. That means the initial sync would be long, but later syncs only refill the amount of songs you’ve played: if you’ve played 20, only 20 new songs will be loaded.

We also got a chance to play around with the application on a T-Mobile BlackBerry Bold; we listened to some indie tunes on the Alternative Chill station and it sounded pretty darn good coming out of the Bold’s dual speakers. We also love the ability to multitask while listening to a Slacker station. While listening to the songs we were able to jump over to the e-mail on the device , navigate through menus and even open up the browser. That sure beats the iPhone’s Pandora app which doesn’t allow for doing anything in the background.

The advertising based service is free, but you can only skip songs 6 times per hour. For $7.95, the Premium version gives you unlimited skips and allows for saving songs you like so you can play them on-demand. We look forward to doing a a full review of the application when it’s available in mid-October, but in the meantime check out our video of the app below.