The slacker app is out and it's everything I was hoping it would be. Great interface, audio quality, UI, all the features are there. If you've never used slacker go sign up (http://www.slacker.com), create a free account and custom station. Give it at least 15 bands and it only plays music from those bands. It's a great thing. Check it out: http://appshopper.com/music/slacker-radio
Frankly, I find it to be sorely lacking in the catalog area. Maybe I just don't go in for mainstream stuff, but I searched for "Subsonic Park", "Park Avenue Music" and even "Nina Hagen".... NOTHING. No results. I mean, Nina Hagen is pretty famous in the punk world, for over 25 years. I'll stick w/ Pandora and Shout; Pandora for the specifics, and Shout for good ol' "station drifting".
I'll go ahead and forward this to Slacker support for you, nothing is immediate but they do what they can to address all lapses in their catalog.
I'm a huge fan of the Pandora app, but I like this so far too. I made a couple of the same stations I have on Pandora and the artists it plays are different. I'm not sure if it's different enough to keep around, but maybe.
Pandora does a great job of picking songs, with how your using the App it's probably about as good as Pandora. The real great part of the App is custom stations. After you give it all your favorite bands, you can still have it auto discover, but you can control how often it does. Also, there are over 100 pre programmed stations as well, something Pandora doesn't have.
The commercials killed this for me. A commercial for auto insurance started playing. The company name was in the artist's name area and the commercials name was in the song title. I couldn't even skip past it. I was iffy about having another app like Pandora, but the commercials settled it.
True, there are about 45 seconds of commercials per hour, and you cannot skip them unless you are a premium member, ~$4/mo.
I have had the G1 Slacker portable for a couple of months from the Woot sale and it is a pretty cool gadget. HOWEVER, the playlists are pretty short, much shorter than Pandora (especially in less popular music genres such as classical or movie scores), but so far the Slacker iPhone app is a much slicker interface...
I lost interest in Slacker for the iphone when i saw it didn't have the caching feature they put on the Blackberry. Pretty disappointing. Oh well.
