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Another little gem coming out of Jim Balsillie’s keynote address at CTIA is the partnership between RIM and music service Slacker. Slacker follows the same vein as Pandora and Last.fm, where your feedback will change the music that’s presented to you, only instead of fishing in a giant bucket of digital music or latching on to your friends’ tastes, Slacker organizes channels by genres full of music hand-picked by musical experts and lets you give selections the thumbs-up or thumbs-down as they’re being played.
The upcoming service on BlackBerry is being previewed at CTIA, and should let users update all of their music wirelessly and listen to their customized channels even when there’s no coverage. It sounds like there’s some pretty high-quality compression going on that allows whole music tracks to be pushed to your device, but no doubt Wi-Fi devices will have a slighlty easier time with that. Despite new data plans lately, those of us in Canada are still getting brutalized and would certainly hesitate about signing up for something like this. Both free and premium service is available, depending on how music-hungry you are, so keep you ears open for a BlackBerry release sometime soon or go ahead and check out the browser-based service already in place.
[via MarketWatch]
About The Author
Simon Sage
Simon Sage’s education largely surrounded writing, technology and online community, leading him to begin his blogging career at www.BlackBerryCool.com and to quickly discover a vibrant and active community surrounding BlackBerry and mobile technology. In exploring RIM’s platform, he has learned what enterprises are looking for in mobility as well as what makes the innocuous BlackBerry so appealing to them. Recently Simon’s been covering RIM’s gradual move into an already-crowded consumer market, and the impact of burgeoning challengers, such as the iPhone, as well as long-time leaders, like Nokia, on BlackBerry’s advancement. With plenty of content under his belt, Simon will be branching off a bit to see what other smartphone manufacturers are working on while still using BlackBerry as a barometer. At IntoMobile, you can count on his posts being even-handed, well-informed and thought-out.
