Review: Podcasting: Nokia Podcast Reading Client
Score:
78%
Version Reviewed: 0.93.6
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Podcasting is changing the way that many people listen to audio programming. It’s a simple concept, linking people all over the world, from the hallowed halls of the BBC to the surfers on the East Coast of the USA (and everywhere in between). Now, pair up ‘pulling MP3’s automatically from the Internet’ and ‘ooh our new phones have Wi-Fi on them’ and you find an application that, truth be told, should be shipping with not only the N91, but the other 3rd Edition Wi-Fi phones as well: Nokia’s “Podcasting” application. Strictly, it’s a podcatcher, the application that grabs the audio files (there are no authoring tools here), and it’s still in beta… but it’s robust, and the beta tag means that it’s okay to be a little rough at the edges, as long as it gets updated on a reasonably decent timescale.
It’s also worth pointing out that this is strictly an S60 3rd Edition application – while it’s labelled as being for the N91 music phone, it should work on any of the 3rd Edition devices (Rafe’s had it running happily on his E61). It’s not that much of a loss to the earlier phones, because while they might have a nice big memory card, they don’t have Wi-Fi.
It’s really Wi-Fi that makes this application work. If you count an ‘average’ podcast as being a single 30 minute long MP3 file, probably around 20MB in size, that’s a lot of data to be sucking down a GPRS link. Maybe when a true unlimited data plan is available around the world this sort of mobile application will take off, but for the moment, I’m thankful the application can be set to only use a Wi-Fi connection, or can prompt me to choose an access point every time it wants to download some podcasts.
A quick recap on how podcasting actually works. Every podcast should have an RSS feed, a piece of textual code that points out where an MP3 file is stored on the web, and some notes about the episode. Each RSS can hold an number of pointers to MP3's. Your podcasting application takes these RSS feeds and treats them a bit like bookmarks. At regular intervals (or when you say “do it now”) it will scurry off and update itself, by checking each small RSS file to see if a new episode is available. If it is, then the MP3 will be downloaded.In the Nokia application, you have the choice to only update the RSS feeds when you want to, or you can set a sliding scale from every 15 minutes, to once a day. You also have options to limit the amount of data you transfer, and what should happen when the data limit is exceeded. For an initial public release, this is a good step, but when you are out of coverage (for example not at your home Wi-Fi hotspot) then there isn’t an option to delay till the access point is reached. Also, if downloading is interrupted you’ll need to download the entire file again, even if you were only 20K away from the end of 67MB. 
There’s a nice searching system for finding podcasts on the Internet, which interfaces with an online directory, and while the initial seeding list in the app is to directories only, they don’t truly illustrate the range of podcasts out there. But you’re not restricted to these directories. As well as manually adding in the RSS feed URL of any podcat you want to subscribe to, you can add your own directories. These will have an OPML file (generally this is a list of RSS feeds) and then the search system will include your choices as well as those supplied. Hopefully Nokia will be taking feedback on this and seeding in a lot more OPML lists as the application matures.
As well as “Search” and “Directories”, the top level menu also has the main entry. Podcasts. In here you’ll have a line for each podcast you are subscribed to. Open this and you’ll see listed all the podcasts available, if you’ve downloaded them, if they are in the middle of downloading, or if you have already listened to them. Icons show this status, but it would be nice to have a filter so you could list all the unlistened podcasts at the top of the list, rather than be left with the date order.
Naturally, the podcast application uses the Music player application in the N91, and I spoke at length about this in the N91 review. In short, outside of an iPod, it’s a well thought out application, but there doesn’t seem to be the tight level of integration with podcasts that I would have hoped for - Music Player regards each podcast as a separate song. What’s most disappointing is there’s no memory of where you are in the podcast. For a thirty minute podcast, you might switch away to another task, take a call or even stop listening until later in the day. If you’ve switched away, then Music Player will only pause the podcast. If you return directly to Music Player, you’ll be able to start from the same place, as long as you don’t play anything else in the meantime! If you call up the podcast from Podcasting, then you’ll be placed back at the start of the file, and you’ll have to manually fast forward to get to the point where you stopped listening (assuming you can remember where it was).
One of the benefits of podcasting is the ability to listen to a show wherever you are, and I hope Nokia comes up with a solution to this so that your position in a show can be remembered outside the running application.
Nokia Podcasting is a great start and, while there are some UI interactions that need sorting out, as a standalone application it gets a big thumbs up. But smartphones are increasingly not standalone devices. The N91 relies heavily on its integration with Windows Media Player... a media player that does not have a podcatcher. I can’t set my PC up to pull down podcasts overnight and send them to the phone in the morning. Sure I can set the N91 to do that over Wi-Fi, but writing to the hard disk and running continual downloads over Wi-Fi really hits the battery life.
As a beta, it’s a welcome piece of software. If this was a regular piece of freeware (and Nokia should be congratulated for making this freely available) then I’d be hoping for two or three updates over the next quarter. If Nokia do that, then they could evolve a brilliant little piece of software which significantly adds to the value of their music smartphones. What we have here is a solid first beta release that is stable and recommended, but I’m watching Finland closely for the updates.
Related links: Ewan's involved, as you can see from the screenshots, in his own high profile music podcast (and podcast network). If you want to grab Ewan's show, it's TPN Rock, on The Podcast Network.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at