[From Darcy Boese, in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada] Hi Sammy! With Apple's new release of the 2.2 firmware, their servers must have been working overtime. I wasn't been able to access the "Updates" tab on my AppStore all day, it kept telling me it can't connect to the iTunes store. It's finally fixed now though, with the total awesomeness of "Download all updates" working directly from the phone!
So with the new firmware, we've got direct-download podcasts on the iPhone now! Yay! But is it all it's cracked up to be? I've had a bit of time to play with it today, so here's my quickie review.
My final verdict up front, if the banned "Podcaster" app is worth 4/5 stars, then Apple's own implementation is only 3/5. Sorry Apple. Read on to find out why.
The first thing you need to do, if you haven't already, is boot your computer and start up iTunes. Find some podcasts you're interested in and sync them to your iPhone. I've got a bunch of feeds from CBC Radio One http://cbc.ca/podcasting that I try to keep up with, most of which are listed in there.
Make sure you've got enough free space on your phone for everything you've downloaded, or else iTunes will offer to pick and choose your music for you. I had to toss a few albums I hadn't listened to yet, a small price to pay I guess.
Having synced the podcasts, go to your phone and start up the iPod app. Hit the "More" button at the bottom and select the "Podcasts". (Personally, I've now used "Edit" to give me direct access to Podcasts when I start the iPod app.) Select any podcast, then pick and episode, and listen!
OK, well, THAT much you could already do before. But now you've got some new features. When you're looking at a podcast's episode list, at the bottom of the list is "Get More Episodes..." Select that, and iTunes starts up. Select more, download them, and when they're done they're straight into your iPod app for your offline listening pleasure. Easy Peasy!
You are, of course, only able to download large podcasts (those bigger than 10MB) if you're on Wi-Fi. If you're hot at a hotspot, anything you pick to download is stuck in a kind of holding pen, where they'll wait until later until you ARE at a hotspot.
It's pretty easy to get more podcasts to watch or listen to from iTunes now, but they lost half a star from my review here, because their setup for adding a new podcast is pretty awkward. There is no way to add an URL manually, so you HAVE to select from the ones Apple already knows about. It would be a great help if, while in the iTunes app, there was a way to view your currently-subscribed podcasts. The way they've got it set up, you've got to switch back and forth between both the iPod and iTunes apps, unless you've got a really good memory.
The iTunes Search function has been expanded to include podcasts now, even if it's waaaaay at the bottom of the listing with no quick way to jump down to that category. Perhaps a future update will create separate tabs so we can quickly choose between Artist, Album, Song and Podcast in the search results. I can only hope...
You can also delete podcast episodes directly from your phone. This seems to be a semi-undocumented feature, but still SEEMS to work. When you're done listening to a podcast, simply swipe from left-to-right and a "Delete" button magically appears. Hit it, and you've got some free space on your phone again! But this is where Apple's implementation loses the other half of a star. Once a podcast has no more downloaded episodes, it is simply GONE from the list. You can no longer select it from a nice convenient list of your favourite podcasts, so you have to either jump back to the iTunes app and search, or resync with your computer.
I did run into another strange problem when deleting a podcast that I'd finished listening to. When I resynced with iTunes later, it was re-added to my iPhone again! I suppose that having deleted it to make room for more ends up meaning that there's no way for iTunes to see the "played" bit, so it got a bit confusing. This is not an issue when using Podcaster.
As a happy customer of Podcaster, I have to say that they did a better job of implementing podcasts than Apple did. Apple's implementation is more slick, but that works out mostly to eye candy, not usefulness. Apple has one major advantage in functionality: those downloaded podcasts can be easily played in the background while you're busy doing other things on the device. Podcaster can do this too, but had to do it via a workaround involving launching Safari to stream it live over the internet, so you then require a network connection, and as we all know, streaming audi can eat up your monthly network bandwidth VERY quickly.
There was one nice feature for the iTunes podcasting I liked. You don't HAVE to download a podcast in order to listen to it. Just select the podcast itself instead of using the "FREE" button to download it, and it just starts playing. This is a good thing, it lets you listen to something quickly without actually subscribing to it.
I beg and plead for Apple to reconsider their Podcaster ban, and let it into the App Store. In any commercial environment, competition is healthy. A little bit of goodwill can go a long way. Even if Apple's implementation is "free", Podcaster's implementation is still worth $5. In its current state, it will need a minor modification in order to be approved, since Podcaster allows large 10MB+ podcasts over the air, but that will be a simple fix.
And oh, by the way Apple? There's a major bug in they way you've set up your podcasting. It violates your own policies. You don't want anybody doing large downloads over 10MB through the 3G network, but it's pretty easy to get around that. All you have to do is go into iTunes while you're still connected to Wi-Fi, and do a search for podcasts. Then you can go back into settings and disable "Wi-Fi". (I suppose you can simply wander away from the hotspot too.) Go back into your iPhone's iTunes, and you can still play anything you've just searched for, regardless of size.
