slacker

The biggest news from the past week came in the form of a long-awaited release of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 beta. After several months of teasing the browser's upgrade with a series of feature-free developer's previews, Microsoft has finally unleashed the public beta for IE9. We gave the latest version a test drive, and you can get a closer look for yourselves in our First Look video and in-depth slideshow.

In other browser news, Mozilla pushed out some surprise quick fixes for Firefox. The two new updates deal with a problem that was crashing the browser during … Read more

Slacker Radio is an intuitive online music player that lets you stream a variety of preprogrammed and custom-made radio stations. The service comes in two models: an ad-supported version that is completely free or a pay option that eliminates the ads and opens a few additional features, such as station caching on a variety of mobile devices. Avoiding commercials costs a very reasonable $4.99 per month, or you can pay an annual fee of $47.88, which works out to $3.99 per month. Paying for the service also lets you circumvent the six-tracks-per-hour skip limit that comes hand-in-hand … Read more

In Slacker Radio, curated stations that are organized by musical genre meet algorithmically-generated playlists based on artists you pick. As with Slacker Radio on other mobile platforms, the Android app lets you stream music from preprogrammed genres and stations, or from stations you set up yourself online. You'll be able to view album art and bios, block a song or vote it a favorite, and skip ahead--this is limited in the free version and limitless in the premium upgrade. If you like what you hear, you can share a link to that station on SlackerRadio.com via e-mail, SMS, … Read more

Ford may have lead the charge to integrate smartphone apps in the car, but this race is heating up fast. Airbiquity, which has previously partnered with Ford, showed off a new architecture to let other automakers put apps hosted on a phone or in the cloud into an automotive interface.

The company demonstrated its new architecture at Telematics Detroit, a conference on in-vehicle connected systems, using the Slacker Internet radio service. The Slacker app, hosted on a smartphone connected to the car through Bluetooth, appears on the car's LCD.

The interface shows driver and passenger station lists, album art, … Read more

Internet radios offer an astounding selection of music from around the world. Whether it's personalized radio from folks like Pandora and Slacker, news from BBC, or a DJ-curated hip-hop mix beamed out of Peru, there's always something worth listening to on the Internet's airwaves.

Tuning in to an Internet radio broadcast typically happens at your computer, on your smartphone, or using a standalone tabletop Internet radio receiver. Beyond your smartphone, however, there are not a whole lot of ways to tune into Internet radio on-the-go.

Fortunately, the few non-phone methods for tuning in Internet radio without the … Read more

Poor Mark Zuckerberg has an almost-literal meltdown on-stage at All Things D and it makes us wonder: is it time for a grownup to take over there? Or just time for Zuck to throw his privacy boss under the bus? Also, HP doesn't want to make smartphones with its new WebOS toy, the Dell Streak continues to baffle, and hey! Globular rovers!

Walt and Kara sweat Zuck at D8 http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-20006653-56.html http://d8.allthingsd.com/20100602/mark-zuckerberg-session/ http://blogs.forbes.com/velocity/2010/06/02/mark-zuckerberg-great-perspirations/

Ballmer and Ozzie http://d8.allthingsd.com/20100603/steve-ballmer-ray-ozzie-session/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-20006637-56.html

HP CEO: “We didn’t buy Palm to be in the smartphone business” http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/02/hp-ceo-we-didnt-buy-palm-to-be-in-the-smartphone-business/

Dell Streak looks like HTC Evo http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-20006644-56.html… Read more

The latest update to the iPhone app for online radio service Slacker, which offers a combination of personalized radio based on particular artists and curated radio stations, just became available in the iTunes Marketplace.

The main advantage of the update, announced a couple weeks ago, is offline station caching, which lets you listen to stations even when you don't have a wireless data connection. It's been available in the Android and BlackBerry versions of the Slacker app since February, and it's a welcome addition to the iPhone version.

Caching is particularly useful if you spend lots of … Read more

Nearly six months have passed since Slacker first announced its intentions to bring caching capability to its app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. In that time, I've received dozens of e-mails from fans of the music service who have been anxiously awaiting for updated app. Today, I get to deliver some good news: Slacker 2.0.56 with iPhone caching exists! In fact, it's downloading stations to my iPod Touch as I write this. Unfortunately, you still can't have it...and yes, I can hear the groans from here. Slacker's latest update has been submitted … Read more

Guess what this episode is all about? Plenty of Zune news, to be sure. First, Zune HD owners will be happy to hear that XviD support and a nifty onboard Smart DJ Mix feature are impending, among other things. Also, Slacker comes to the Windows Mobile OS...but does anyone care? Finally, we throw a little love the iPad's way. Oh, and we have a special guest visitor this week, but he's not saying much.

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