Slacker Android

Cellphone streaming represents the ultimate combination of convenience for consumers and business model flexibility for online music companies, but there’s one big problem: data connections, in the U.S. anyway, aren’t up to the task of streaming hours of high-quality music in a row without dropouts. And as more people begin streaming media to smartphones, the problem will only get worse.

The solution — pioneered by Slacker on its own hardware, embraced by Spotify, and promised by Rhapsody — is to cache music on the phone so that you can still listen to your collection even without a fast data connection.

On Tuesday, Slacker added the interactive station caching feature to its Android and Blackberry music streaming apps with a new wrinkle: The apps can now refresh the music automatically at night, but only when the device is plugged in so as not to waste battery power.

For now, Slacker’s iPhone and iPod Touch apps lack station caching and the associated nighttime auto-refresh feature, but Slacker demonstrated iPhone music caching at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, and according to Slacker spokesman Anders Steele, the iPhone version will be released “soon.” (For once, the Blackberry crowd can gloat about an app feature not available to iPhone users.)

This update is great news for Android and Blackberry phone owners who enjoy Slacker’s $5-per-month streaming music subscription — or who want to try the caching feature with a 14-day free trial. Without caching and other extra features, the Slacker service is free on the computer and phone.

As the move to cloud-based entertainment continues, expect this feature to show up in all sorts of apps for the car, phone, netbook, boombox, or anything else that needs a data connection to play music or video, but doesn’t always have a fast enough connection, or any connection at all.

The addition of nightly auto-refresh makes a crucial feature all the more effective. After all, if you like your music stale, you might as well use a regular MP3 player.

Supporters of phones based on the Android operating system from Google are getting some help in this matter through a number of recent partnerships designed to streamline their music capabilities. T-Mobile, the first U.S. wireless operators to embrace Android phones, is working with music management software company DoubleTwist. Under the deal, T-Mobile will both embed the DoubleTwist software in upcoming Android-based devices – including the new myTouch Fender special edition phone – as well as encourage existing Android users to download the technology.

DoubleTwist operates much like iTunes in that it’s used to create playlists, transfer files between devices, and otherwise handle all the music management functions needed on a mobile phone. Android devices have no default music management software, leaving users on their own to figure out how to interact with music on the phone.

DoubleTwist has emerged as a popular iTunes alternative for service providers. It earlier struck a deal with Amazon to provide its technology to users of the retailer’s MP3 store. Android users can also download a mobile version of the Amazon MP3 store to buy and download music but, again, it relies on users to find and download the app on their own.

In Europe, mobile entertainment firm Aspiro created an app to bring its music streaming to Android devices as well. And of course Spotify offers an Android app to provide paying members access to its on-demand streaming service.

While many streaming music services like Pandora have found huge success on the iPhone, others like DoubleTwist are finding more success on rival devices by offering them the capabilities needed to compete against Apple. Myxer for instance found that both Android and BlackBerry owners are far more active visitors its mobile content Web site than iPhone users. The company-which sells ringtones, videos, games and other entertainment content-says it saw seven times as many downloads to Android-based devices than iPhone in the fourth quarter of last year. The BlackBerry Curve is the top phone on the company’s site, responsible for 10% of all visits over the last two years. All BlackBerry devices combined represent 67% of the company’s traffic.