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]