January 8th, 2009
CES 2009: Slacker Mobile for BlackBerry and FlyCast for Google Android, PC, & Mac announced
Streaming internet radio is very popular today with mobile clients and desktop clients like Pandora and Last.fm. At CES today, two more services announced expanded coverage, improved features, and availability. Slacker, Inc. announced Slacker Mobile for the BlackBerry so you no longer need to have a dedicated Slacker player to enjoy music on the go. FlyCast announced a client for the Android/T-Mobile G1 and desktop players for Windows PCs and Mac.
The Slacker Mobile for BlackBerry client is available now for free. The Slacker G2 portable player device was announced last Fall, but now you can use your BlackBerry, with software version 4.3 or higher, to listen to over 100 programmed Slacker stations. The application has the following features:
- Free music library featuring millions of songs
- High-quality stereo playback from cached stations and all streaming wireless connections
- Over 100 professionally programmed genre stations
- Create custom artist stations
- Station caching for music playback anywhere, greatly improved battery life and accelerated application performance
- Multi-tasking; listen to music while doing email
- View artist biographies and photos
- View album art and reviews
- “Peek Ahead” artist and album preview
- Rate songs as favorites
- Ban songs and artists you don’t like
I don’t have a BlackBerry to test this out on right now, but will be checking out people’s experiences with the service to see how it performs.
When I did have a BlackBerry Bold, the streaming service I used was FlyCast. FlyCast is available now for BlackBerry and iPhone devices and today’s announcement brings the service to the T-Mobile G1/Google Android and your PC or Mac desktop. The Android application will appear shortly on the Android Market and I’ll be sure to download, install, and evaluate it here as soon as it becomes available. You can download the Mac/PC version now and stream content for free. FlyCast also enhanced upgraded their program guide, enhanced 300 stations with unlimited song skipping capability, added Facebook Connect functionality, integrated AccuWeather.com data and added support for broadcasters to deploy streams in AAC+ and Windows Media formats.
Matthew Miller is an avid mobile device enthusiast who works during the day as a professional naval architect in Seattle. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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