The stars have clearly aligned for me with Slacker. Yesterday I spoke with Jonathan Sasse at the company for an update on Slacker happenings. During which conversation I discovered that Slacker is actually now available on my Squeezebox now. And finally, today my Slacker portable player arrived in the mail. Hooray!

I’ll save some of the details from my conversation with Jonathan for another post, except to say that Slacker will start shipping its hardware to retail chains in the next couple of weeks. No word yet on which stores or exact timing, but it sounds like we could see players on shelves by summer.

As for my own Slacker player, I’ll work on a full review for ZNF as soon as possible. I unboxed today and will start playing tonight.

In the meantime, I’m thoroughly enjoying Slacker on my Squeezebox. I signed in to my Slacker account on the SqueezeNetwork and my custom stations were instantly available on my living-room stereo. CNET’s John Falcone also commented on the ease of managing Internet radio accounts via the Squeezebox in his glowing review of the Squeezebox Duet. While he doesn’t go into detail on each of the radio services, I can attest to the fact that managing both Slacker and Pandora is remarkably straightforward.

One other note: My living-room stereo for the moment consists of a SurroundXi portable speaker system plugged into the Squeezebox. The SurroundXi is a review unit designed to work primarily with iPods, but I’m finding it quite suitable for my needs. It’s also the perfect size right now given that we’ve moved all of our furniture to prepare for the wood flooring we’re having installed tomorrow. I can carry my entire stereo system (Squeezebox plus SurroundXi) in one trip up to the bedroom when the contractors arrive.

Ericsson is predicting the end of Wi-Fi hotspots in favor of mobile broadband. Sounds great. I love it. But are Ericsson and the tech elite unaware of how expensive mobile broadband is for the average Joe? I’m dying for always-on mobile connectivity, but until service plans drop below $60 per month (or until we get rid of service plans all together) I’ll stick with my free local hot spot at the Bear Rock Cafe.

We have multiple iPods in my house (like Dave) and have registered those iPods to multiple computers over time. So when I got my iPod Shuffle last year, I thought I’d make life easy by setting up a folder in iTunes on our one desktop computer acting as a home media server. I can add and remove songs from that one folder, sync my Shuffle, and voila! I have a brand new workout mix.

Unfortunately yesterday I couldn’t find my Shuffle before my run on the treadmill, so I grabbed my old iPod Mini. The Mini still works great, but it had none of my new favorite workout tunes. I knew I could sync the Mini to the folder I’d dedicated to the Shuffle to grab my newer stuff, but that would mean erasing all of the existing music on the Mini. Worse, the computer that was originally registered to the Mini - holding all of my purchased iTunes music and uploaded CDs - is long gone. Essentially my Mini has been carrying music with no back-up.

In the end, I decided most of my purchased iTunes music had likely been added to our household music library on the dedicated media server computer. There was a decent chance that some of my uploaded CDs weren’t in the library, but if necessary, I still had those CDs packed away somewhere and could find and re-upload them. (Not that that will ever happen…)

Bottom line: I gave up worrying about losing the music on my Mini and synced it to the music I had set aside for my Shuffle. (more…)

AT&T’s John Stankey presented to investors earlier this week - among the things he talked about are upgrades coming this year to the U-verse IPTV service. New features seem to roughly track with what Dave reported last June. Whole-home DVR is scheduled for the second half of 2008, though Stankey mentioned “mid-year” so the guess is it’ll roll out in Q3. Looks like additional streams are coming too - two HD and two SD. And apparently AT&T will be introducing pair bonding before the end of the year. Pair bonding should extend the reach of the operator’s DSL network and increase speeds for households within the 3,000-foot range of AT&T’s copper loop.

Photo frames are pretty much commoditized at this point, but the subtle differences among them still make it difficult to choose the right one. I recently tested Aluratek’s 11″ product (MSRP $230), and while it doesn’t offer anything revolutionary (still waiting for a workable frame that receives emailed photos…), it does an elegant job of displaying photos, and it requires virtually zero technical ability. Bottom line: It’s a great photo frame for mom’s living room.

The Aluratek comes with a power cord, USB cable, remote and 1GB memory card in the box. In my case, I plugged the frame in and then connected a USB flash drive. A library of my photos popped up immediately, and by clicking “enter” on the remote I got the full-screen visual. The remote also has a handy “slideshow” button for one-click slideshow action. No need to drill down into menus. I have to admit I had momentary difficulty getting the remote to work until I realized the need to remove a plastic covering. Chalk that one up to user error.

Manipulating photos on the Aluratek frame is extremely easy. Pressing “enter” a second time zooms in on photos, and pressing “up” or “down” rotates them. For complicated maneuvers you can go into the menu to do things like add photo transitions. You know, if you want to get fancy.

My one beef with the Aluratek is that if you get up close there is some graininess. (Click on the thumbnail right for a close look.) Photos look perfectly fine at a distance of a foot or more away, but if resolution is your thing, the Aluratek is not the best choice. There I’d still go with a Westinghouse. (Similar frame sizes are comparably priced on Amazon under $190)

Other cool features on the Aluratek include video and music modes. I plugged in my Flip video camera and instantly had access to the video stored there. (Some digital photo frames still don’t support video.) Unfortunately I couldn’t hear the sound on the videos, but I’ll give Aluratek the benefit of the doubt on that - perhaps it had something to do with the Flip, rather than the frame. In slideshow mode when the frame was just showing demo images from the Flip the demo music was perfectly audible. Decent quality too.

All in all, I’d recommend the Aluratek frame. It’s stylish (I like the cherry-wood color) and it’s easy, easy, easy to use. Lots more photos after the jump. Full specs available here. (more…)

ABC and Cox Communications have announced a new VOD service that will let cable subscribers watch primetime network shows any time they want. The catch? No fast forwarding through commercials.

This project seems similar in approach to Time Warner’s network-DVR applications, Start Over and Look Back: It gives consumers more control over access to content, but less control over the ads they’d likely prefer to skip. ABC and Cox actually announced the application last May, but it appears they’ve now run field tests and are ready to launch.

Between new on-demand ad technologies and the un-skippable commercials in content streamed over the Internet, advertisers are fighting back against several years of falling TV revenues. Not that they ever should have been worried. There’s always been alternatives such as product placement and, with the move to digital television, it’s always been clear we’d be hitting the reset button on the TV advertising model.

DVRs gave us a free lunch for a while, but advertisers are finding other ways to make us pick up the tab.

I officially entered old age last week (though that might be a slight exaggeration…). But on the bright side I got a lot of great birthday greetings and gadget gifts.

Messages came in over Facebook, via text, voicemail, e-cards, and (my favorite) via a Flip video - from my old office colleagues wishing me a happy birthday, and it was a perfect snapshot of what goes on in that den of iniquity every day.

As far as presents go, I got an Eye-Fi (Dave digs it and something I’ll write about when I get it out of the box), a digital photo frame (not one I’ve reviewed yet, so I’ll let you know), and the new Slacker portable device! The Slacker radio isn’t actually here yet, but it should be arriving any day. Dave thinks the Slacker business model has a rough road ahead, but if the player works as well as it’s supposed to, I’ll definitely be one one of the ones pulling for their success.

More to come as the presents are fully unwrapped.