Tech Blog

[#1]

I've slowly been going through everything I brought back from WES in Orlando, and I discovered the coolest thing yesterday.  SanDisk gave me one of their products called SlotRadio+ that they're currently offering with Verizon in the US.

The basic premise with SlotRadio+ is that you get a microSD card that comes preloaded with 1,000 songs that you can then plug into your SlotRadio+ player, or into your BlackBerry.  The cards also come with additional space - in the case of my card, it comes with an additional 4GB of space for your own music/files/videos, etc.

The one catch is that in order to access the music on the card, you need to download the SlotRadio music player.  But once you open up the SlotRadio+ application, you get full access to a set of music that's organized into several clear playlists and includes Album pictures, and lets you flip the corner of the album to view what the upcoming track is.

The microSD card I was given was the BillBoard Decades card, and includes music from the '00s, '90s, '80s, Rock Classics, Oldies, and RB Classics.  There were also two additional playlists called Workout and Chillout.

Now here's the really cool part.  The music. I've had so much fun going through the playlists and listening to music I used to listen to growing up.  The '90s playlist has brought back so many memories, and has been a blast.  I also used to love the Oldies growing up, but they aren't easy to find anymore.  Well, now I have my own selection.  And unlike a lot of similar ideas, these are actually songs you know and like.  For example, there's The Cranberry's, Toad the Wet Sprocket, U2, Dog's Eye View, Garbage, Everclear, Hole, Cypress Hill, and they even have things like Spice Girls, No Doubt and a lot more.  You might not recognize all those names yourself, but you will when you hear the music.   And you can add songs to your favourites and essentially create your own playlist.

This isn't to say it's perfect.  There are a few things I'm not a fan of.  For example, I've yet to discover an easy way to restart the playlist, and I haven't figured out how to go back a song (can only skip forward), plus, the only way to play the music is via the SlotRadio+ player, which is unfortunate when you want to mix your own music in, but that's not really the point.  This is essentially a value added service, and is a great idea to get people started with music on their BlackBerry smartphones, etc.

Everyone knows that you can use iTunes with the iPhone, but people don't often think of BlackBerry smartphones much as a media player.  Well, it is one and, and this is a great introduction.  And I'm loving the mix!  Now we just need for this to become available here as well!

[#2]

I should also add... I was skeptical about the premise with this and had actually been putting this aside for a bit.  I'm not usually a fan of checking out these sorts of things, and I'm usually very reluctant to add extra apps to my phone... but I was so wrong and I'm really happy I opened up the package and tried it out.

[#3]

Update to the above... I found a big missing feature with this... there is no ability to play over Bluetooth audio, meaning I wasn't able to stream the audio to my car stereo via my BlackBerry Visor Mount Speakerphone.  It also means I can't stream it at home using my BlackBerry music gateway.  I will be letting SanDisk know about this big miss and maybe they'll fix it in an update.

[#4]

Turns out it does work. I just had a glitch with my last OS install.