Going on 5 weeks of ownership now. Overall I love the car but slacker is maddening.
It performs really poorly when connectivity is spotty. By spotty, I mean anything less than 4 bars... I've rebooted the console several times to no benefit. I get all sorts of odd behavior:
When it stutters, the left scroll wheel click (for pause) is sometimes ignored. This could be a unrelated to the slacker code but doesn't give me warm-n-fuzzies about the FW quality, overall. It does make me wonder if the stuttering is not related to connectivity at all but rather runaway code somewhere else.
Slacker Radio content is pretty lacking.
Frankly, I'd much prefer Pandora but won't be holding my breath.
It performs really poorly when connectivity is spotty. By spotty, I mean anything less than 4 bars... I've rebooted the console several times to no benefit. I get all sorts of odd behavior:
- stuttering. pausing it for a few seconds sometimes helps it fill up the buffer.
- plays for a few seconds and then skips to next song
- plays most of the way through but skips to the next song prematurely (typically 20-30 seconds left).
- progress indicator advances (slider moves and elapsed time advances) but no sounds come out for a long while. usually about 30 seconds.
- it does this spastic pause/play thing where it plays for a second or two, shows the pause control graphic, a second or two later is shows the play graphic and resumes. This repeats until I push the next button. Next song usually plays fine.
When it stutters, the left scroll wheel click (for pause) is sometimes ignored. This could be a unrelated to the slacker code but doesn't give me warm-n-fuzzies about the FW quality, overall. It does make me wonder if the stuttering is not related to connectivity at all but rather runaway code somewhere else.
Slacker Radio content is pretty lacking.
- the rotation seems kind of small. Within a given channel, I've heard the same song inside of an hour or two (should be days, at least)
- the radio feature where you seed it with an artist or song and it picks similar songs is pretty bad. I don't know what Carol King and the BeeGees have in common (oh, yeah, she 's a disco queen or something). And why does Steve Miller Band seem to match everyone? The Slacker matching algorithm bites.
Frankly, I'd much prefer Pandora but won't be holding my breath.