I love podcasts.
I listen to around two hours of podcasts every day. Recently I bought an android phone. I have now swapped the SIM back and am using my iphone 3gs so I can listen to podcasts again.
There are many podcasting apps you can get for android but my experience with ( I tried them all) is that none is as good as iTunes. This is bourne out by the fact that currently 89% of podcasts are listened to on IOS followed by 9% on android and 2% on RIM.
People who don’t have apple products moan about iTunes , the main gripe is that you have to plug in you phone to download podcasts. Smartphones generally need charging every day so when mine is charging all the shows I have heard yesterday are removed and replaced with new ones. (Up to a max of 5 per podcast feed). So all I do is charge my phone (I do nothing to my mac) and my phone is charged and my podcasts are automatically loaded.
Recently I bought an android phone (a samsung galaxy note). My experience with android was so painful that eventually I sold the Samsung galaxy note and bought and iphone 5 (after trying many different approaches and wasting many hours of trying to get things to work).
Podcasting on Android?
You have 3 options
- An android app
- Software to make iTunes manage your podcasts
- Use double twist or another iTunes like application
Why I did not like android apps
(I tried doggatcher, beyondpod and some other less usefull apps)
- Uploading my podcasts feed in itunes did not work on any of the applications
- the wifi direct upload was uniformly unreliable when I tried to automate it
- It took a while to work out how they work and generally the apps were difficult to navigate
- It is harder to manage feeds or search for feeds on a phone than it is on itunes
I also tried itunes like software including double-twist and other clones
None of the itunes clones worked properly for podcasts – even soTHe only way I could get it to synch was to download all podcasts (not the 3 or 5 recent unlisted) this meant my 16GB phone got filled and the sync failed. I also tried other iphone clones like doubletwist, Miro, Nightinghale and others and found them lacking to the point they were unusable for podcasts
I have 120gb of podcasts on my laptop I like having them there. It means I can listen to old shows if I had used an android phone to download them
So i bought an iphone 5
I now see that apple has created an iphone app for podcasts. If they remove podcasting from itunes I will not be making further updates to itunes. I actually don’t understand why they built the app. It looks like they are copying Android but why?
On the topic of Apple
I am currently reading the Steve Jobs biography by . Its pretty compelling reading really – warts and all. And theirs alot of great stuff and alot of warts!