Slacker Radio Brings Offline Music Caching to the iPhone

Slacker Radio, the Pandora-like personalized radio service for the iPhone (and many other platforms), just launched an updated version of its iPhone app. Besides the typical bug fixes and performance updates, this new version also offers a first: offline caching for the iPhone and iPod touch.

Given that AT&T just announced its data caps for the iPhone, this is timely news, as it will allow Slacker’s subscribers to conserve some of their precious bandwidth.

The only negative here is that you have to subscribe to Slacker’s premium service, which allows users to skip as many songs as they like (the basic version only allows six skips per hour). Subscriptions for Slacker Plus start at $3.99 per month. Users with a free Slacker subscription will be able to try this feature out for free for the next 14 days. You just have to make sure that you have enough free disk space on your device to cache these songs (sadly, Slacker doesn’t tell you how much space it needs).