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Slacker
Slacker Radio, the intuitive online music player that lets you stream a variety of preprogrammed and custom-made radio stations, has been churning out apps for mobile devices for a while now, with the first one coming to Blackberry devices in early 2009. Of course, in the quickly evolving cell phone space, staying relevant means making sure you’ve got new apps for the latest and greatest mobile operating systems, and right now, the latest is Windows Phone 7.
We got a preview of Slacker for Windows Phone 7 back in October, but the app was officially launched for the OS today. The guts aren’t very different from any of the other Slacker mobile apps: the service is free; the app displays album art, artist bios, and reviews along with standard track info; you get more than 130 crafted stations and as many customized stations as you care to make; and you can heart and ban tracks as well skip up to six tracks in an hour. There’s also the option to upgrade to Plus, which gets rid of the skip limits and ads, provides complete song lyrics, and allows mobile-device caching for offline playback.
However, the actual look and feel of Slacker for Windows Phone 7 is quite a bit different than any of the other apps. It’s very Zune-like, for lack of a better word. You can scroll through all the menus from left to right, and the featured music section looks much like the QuickPlay area of the Zune, with “pinned” album art. The image above does the interface more justice than any words can, really. All in all, it’s smooth and easy to use, though the scrolling is a bit too swift for my tastes. Of course, that is probably due to the actual Windows 7 device and not the app.
Slacker is now available for free in the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace.
