From the gadget wires…

This product was awarded a best in show designation at the Consumer Electronics Show. For $100, you get a little Shuttle-like MP3 player with 1000 Billboard top songs already loaded on the Sandisk memory disk. The product is manufactured by Sandisk, so of course you can get more storage and more tunes.

Think of it. It’s like getting iTunes music at 10 cents on the dollar. Sure, you may only like 10 percent of it, but if you like to listen to all genres of music, but don’t know what to pick one song at a time (iTunes), then this may be the player for you, Playa!

Check this out from Blah Girls.

I know this has been around for months, but I thought this should be my first technology post on KB.  If you have an iPhone, and don’t have Pandora, run to the app store and download it for free.  A longtime desktop user of Pandora, I was skeptical of the performance on my phone, but this thing is amazing.  As described by Michelle Lentz of bub.blicio.us:

Once you have installed the iPhone Pandora app, it’s a matter of minutes before you set up your universal (accessible from your desktop and your phone) account. Once your account is set up, you can create your own radio stations. Enter the name of an artist or song you like. Pandora, using the Music Genome Project, analyzes the song and discovers similar songs. The end result is a radio station that plays everything you like.

This is the digital music game changer.  It is the leading, 2,000,000+ downloaded app on iTunes.  People are trying to get it to play through their car radios, canceling their satellite radio service, not downloading as much purchased music, and playing their personalized Pandora stations all day.  The database that feeds the tunes from the Music Genome Project is incredible.  I have traditional John Lee Hooker Blues, Memphis Horns style “Roomfull of Blues”, Louis Jordan Jump Blues, Basie Big Band,  and loved my “Merry Christmas Baby” soulful Christmas channel.  Not only is it dead accurate building a channel you like after only entering a few favorite songs, but your station improves as you vote thumbs-up or down while they feed the tunes to you.  It kills the paradigm of “popular play lists” or even unique segment music radio stations; Pandora is better.  It outplays your personal music collection, and adds new artists you’ve never heard of; Pandora has more.  You can create infinate, narrowly specific channels to your personal interests and preferences.  XM/Sirrius has one Blues channel; Pandora is better.   Astoundingly, Pandora is completely free.

Also amazing is the streaming download playing without skipping on my iPhone.  I don’t know how it works, but it is an incredible feat of programming.

The flaws are minor.  Sometimes, I wish there were more selections.  Honestly to Jebus, it is FREE, and I’ve been listening days long as my background music at work for over a year.  If I think the rotation of songs is too familliar, I either add another artist or tune to the mix, which broadens the databse of selections, or I make up a new channel.

I thought the GPS mapping would be the killer app for iPhone purchasers.  I was wrong.  Pandora is the killer iPhone app.

http://bub.blicio.us/iphone-app-pandora/