If you don?t have a smartphone but instead have an iPod, Creative, iRiver, etc. device then you don?t have any wireless capabilities built in (yet). In that case, you?re usually tied to your host PC. So, how about if you could put a piece of software on the player that would run on the player any time you connect it to a USB port on any PC? You connect the player to the USB port, the software runs on the player, and it checks your RSS feeds and downloads new podcast audio directly to your player. No software to install on the host PC, so you could even do it from Kinko?s, library kiosks, friends? places, etc. The only questions are if players could execute applications upon connection to USB, but I?m sure there is a way to do that. They make U3 USB flash drives that connect and run applications entirely from the flash drive, so the concept is the same. The only question would be if you could make the application execute automatically of if the user would have to initiate it manually.
Food for thought...
Most smartphones now have at least some degree of multimedia capability ? Windows Mobile 5, Windows Smartphone OS, Palm OS, Symbian are all good. More and more smartphones are starting to integrate memory expansion via SD or miniSD card - or simply have more on-board memory to begin with. And more and more smartphones are starting to integrate 3G data technologies for broadband-like speeds over cellular networks.
Why not have a podcast subscription client for the mobile phone OSes? I travel frequently (so I'm away from my podcast-subcribing iTunes client) and have a brand new Palm Treo 700p. I would be great if my podcasts were kept up to date on my Treo and I could listen to new content whenever, whereever. The combination of EV-DO to download the content and a 2 GB SD card to store it makes this a perfect solution for me.
Ideally and in my humble opinion, this is how it would work. You would input or search for the RSS feed, and then the RSS subscriptions will periodically poll for new content and download the podcast audio files to the smartphone?s onboard memory or expansion card (definitely would want to be able to choose where to store them). It would also be preferred to be able to disable automatic polling for greatly control for those without unlimited data plans.
Does anyone know if something like this exists? If so, any recommendations for programs that work well? I have found RSS readers for Palm OS, but the ones I have found don't support RSS with enclosures. I'm personally interested in Palm OS based programs, but feel free to share if you use anything for any OS.
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