Slacker G2 incorporates key navigational features and a portable radio player. It is indeed a phenomenal concept that could go off. Its very attractive to music lovers who don’t have the money to buy all of the tunes they want. The Slacker G2 is of course, an upgrade to the bulky and buggy first-gen player. In this device, you have all the station updates over Wifi with the same link to Slacker’s online music service. The new player offers a better portable version of that experience than Slacker’s first-generation Portable Radio.

The G2 sports a 320-by-240-pixel TFT screen which is nicely visible in sunlight, and it displays extensive information about bands and albums while a song is playing. The background data includes extensive band bios and album reviews from All Music Guide–another big reason that the Slacker G2 shines as a device for music discovery.  Furthermore, a more conventional user will love Slacker G2’s throwback controls. They’re all buttons, wheels, and rockers, instead of touch-sensitive controls: a home button, a scroll wheel for navigating menus, and a lock button appear on the side. Play/pause, skip forward, and skip back buttons appear below the screen. A heart button (to tag favorite tracks for more-frequent random playback) and a ban button (to remove individual tracks from the playback mix) appear above the screen. There’s also a four-pin USB port for charging the player and loading tracks onto it.

A Slacker G2 player that supports 25 of your custom-built stations costs $200; a 40-station Slacker G2 player goes for $250. All of the music is free, and you can add, refresh, and reconfigure your stations as much as you want.

via: slacker