Slacker radio comes to every Verizon Blackberry Storm

by Scott Carmichael on

Here at Gadling, we’ve been huge Slacker fans for ages – their personal radio player even won a spot in our top 25 travel gadgets of 2008.

Apparently we were not the only ones to notice the power of Slacker, because Verizon Wireless just announced that they would “push” the Slacker player to every single Blackberry Storm. This means millions of Storm owners will have access to the awesome radio channels in the Slacker lineup, as well as the ability to create their own personalized channel.

The Slacker player for the Blackberry Storm even lets users purchase tracks from the V Cast Music store. One of the most powerful features of Slacker for the Blackberry is the ability to cache music to the storage card, which means listeners won’t be without music when they are outside the coverage area. Of course, since Verizon offers the largest 3G network in the nation, this means you’ll need to be on a plane or in a tunnel to take advantage of cached streaming!

Expect to see the Slacker player icon show up on your Blackberry Storm in the next couple of days, but you can of course already take advantage of the service by heading to Slacker.com and checking it out in your browser.

Slacker personal radio service comes to the Blackberry

by Scott Carmichael on

Remember Slacker? Their personal radio service was one of the winners in the Gadling “best of 2008” lineup of travel technology products.

Until now, the only way to take Slacker with you on the road, was through one of their portable radio players. That just changed with the release of Slacker for the Blackberry.

Users of a fairly recent Blackberry device can download the free Slacker application directly to their device by pointing their mobile browser to Slacker.com.

The application offers all the same features you’ll find on the other Slacker players, plus you’ll be able to store several hours of tunes on a memory card (when installed).

With music cached on your memory card, you’ll be able to keep listening to music even when you are outside your network coverage area, or away from your WiFi network.

Slacker also announced that they’ll have an iPhone version of their player ready soon!

Rentobile lets you rent the hottest mobile phones

by Scott Carmichael on

When it comes to mobile phones, there really are only 2 kinds of users – those that buy a phone and use it until the tape holding it together finally gives up, and those that consider their phone to be part of their fashion ensemble, requiring a new phone every 2 months.

Sadly I have to admit that I’m one of the latter – I’ll swap my phone out for a new one in anything from 2 weeks to 2 months, but rarely will I be happy with my purchase for more than a couple of months. Not because the phone sucks, but because the damn phone companies keep releasing something newer (and better) at a frantic rate.

Of course, this silly hobby is quite expensive, so when I came across Rentobile, I couldn’t help wonder whether they have finally cracked the code to keeping us phone freaks happy (and solvent).

Rentobile appears to be Netflix for phone lovers. You add a phone to your wishlist, and when one becomes available, they’ll ship it to you. You then continue to use it until you are bored with it, or until the next best super phone pops up on their site.

Rental rates are between $20 and $50 a month, and their lineup includes top sellers like the T-Mobile G1, the Blackberry Bold and Storm smartphones and the Verizon Touch Pro.

Rental rates are different for members and non members. For example; the Nokia N95 costs $42 per month for non members, or $28 per month for members. Membership starts at $5 per month when prepaid for an entire year.

The site itself could use a little polishing, and most of the bestselling phones are currently “not available”, but the concept seems brilliant so I wish them all the luck in the world in making this a huge success.

(Via Engadget Mobile)