Digital Trends

Slacker G2 (4GB) November 3rd, 2008 | by Nick Mokey

The Slacker Premise

As the name suggests, Slacker’s music service centers around ease of use, targeting the lowest common denominator of music consumer who just want an enjoyable stream of music without the hassle of selecting and acquiring it. In other words: traditional radio listeners.

Using Slacker’s free online music service, you merely select a genre of music, or build your own station from a list of favorite artists, and the music begins flowing. Unlike traditional Web radio, you can pause tracks as they play, skip them, and fine tune what Slacker plays by choosing some songs as favorites and banning others. But more importantly, at the end of the day, there’s no downloading, purchasing, arranging or maintaining of a library.

The basic service, though free, comes with some restraints. You only get five skips in an hour, for instance, and you’ll sometimes hear interstitial ads between songs. Slacker’s premium option, which costs between $7.50 and $10 a month (depending on subscription length), lifts these restrictions. It also unlocks other options, like saving songs for your personal library, and requesting specific songs be added to your stations.

The G2 takes either service mobile by essentially collecting an enormous buffer of queued songs in its memory, then recreating the Slacker interface in a portable player. Though it shares the same guts as any other basic flash-based MP3 player, Slacker’s unique form of loading, arranging and playing the content puts a completely different face on the device. 

The Hardware

Unlike the original, brick-like Slacker player, the G2 measures only 3.4 inches long, 2 inches wide, and a little more than half an inch deep, making it comfortable palm-sized, even for those with small hands. The original rectangular profile remains intact, but Slacker has rounded out the edges significantly and done away with the old unit’s “touch strip” for scrolling, switching instead to a ridged scroll wheel on the right-hand side. Besides the usual back, forward and play/pause buttons on the unit’s face below its 320 x 240 LCD screen, the G2 features to Slacker-centric extras above the screen: favorite and ban buttons for providing Slacker with input on which songs should stay and which need to go. A lock button and home button on the right-hand side round out its selection of buttons, along with a volume rocker on top. The only inputs are a headphone jack on the top and a mini-USB jack on the lower right-hand side.

A weight of only 74 grams makes the G2 feel exceptionally light for its size, and we liked the silky matte black material that the majority of the player is constructed from – it reminded us of the high-quality plastic used in the construction of ThinkPads. Overall, the design is practical, but no eye-catcher, save for the rear, where Slacker has used a bright silver for the back plate, and stuck on its interesting winged logo against a chrome placard.

Inside, the G2 hosts either 4GB or 8GB of flash memory, which Slacker equates to 25 stations and 40 worth of content, respectively. Besides being able to pull the stations via USB to fill up that space, there’s also a Wi-Fi radio, which can be configured to interface with a home network then automatically reconnect and refresh content when it’s in range, eliminating the need to connect it to a PC at all.

Accessories

Besides the headphones, the accessories included with the Slacker were of relatively high quality, and useful to boot. Slacker’s soft-plastic case with belt clip (normally an accessory we would expect to drop $15 on) made a useful add-on for taking the player running or to the gym. The company’s solution for a charger and data cable was also slick: Slacker provides a USB data cable and a special slim wall adapter that terminates in a full-size USB port, allowing the same cable to work for both functions. It’s a small change from offering a separate cable for each, but it cuts down on clutter when travelling, and the wall adapter can be used for charging or powering absolutely any USB accessory.

The Slacker G2 and accessories