I’d never heard for Slacker radio, but we’ll get to that. First, Blackberry announced, or released, or opened its application store, which they call Blackberry App World . I fiddled with a few downloads, only the free ones of course, and not many stayed on my Storm longer than the day was long. Having said that, I am excited for the store’s opening. But not because it means I can get potentially cool and useless new apps for my smart phone, but because I like to see programmers writing small, efficient  programs for constricted environments. You know, like the days before processors and RAM were in too much abundance.  It’s a food feeling.

Moving on.

Slacker radio, what the heck is that?  (Slacker is more like Pandora than it is like last.fm.)  And why hadn’t I heard of it before?  Your radio everywhere .  That’s what they call it.  I’ve only had a short bit of time to tinker with its service, but what I was presented with impressed me. And I’m talking about what was streamed to my mobile phone.  Buffering was adequate so there weren’t any skips in the song.  Navigation and song or station selection through the app was clean and easy to manipulate.  Not sure what it does to the battery life of my phone since I have logged a lot of consecutive minutes of playback.  And I can say the speaker on the Storm isn’t horrible.

While I think the blackberry app world leads its fan base further from the professional working world,  it’s nice to finally see Blackberry step up on this front.  This opens the doors for developers to create quality apps (enterprise or recreational) on the Blackberry, allowing BB addicts to fully utilize all the cloud 2.0 web services they’re hooked on.

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Slacker Radio In A Blackberry World was first posted to justinll.com on April 3, 2009.