This week Google Labs released a new application for listening to podcasts on Google Android phones, called Listen. A one word assessment of this application is that it is an alpha release, and after trying it out a bit, I have to wonder whether the people who wrote the application actually subscribe to and listen to podcasts. Basically, Listen is a slightly kicked up media player that allows you to search for media to play from a variety of podcasts. It seems to be optimized for finding and playing, for one time, a podcast which works for checking out podcasts or finding something on a whim that you want to listen to.
The problem is that the power behind podcasts is the subscription model where after you subscribe to a podcast you then automatically get new episodes when they are released. As far as I can tell, Listen does not automatically retrieve new episodes, you have to go into My Subscriptions when it then checks for new episodes. Another big problem is with the process for adding subscriptions. Just about every podcast player that I have used provides a way for you to manually add a podcast feed, which is really just an RSS feed with an enclosure, even if it has a directory of popular podcasts. There is no way to manually add a podcast to Listen, so if the search function doesn’t find the podcast that you are looking for, you are not going to hear it in Listen.
The relationship between the Listen Queue and Subscriptions is confusing. What I expected is that the Listen Queue would have new episodes, while My Subscriptions is for managing your subscriptions. Right now the Listen Queue is a playlist to which you manually add the episodes that you want to listen too. I like the idea of being able to manually create a playlist of episodes, but how I normally a podcast program for is to just start playing the new episodes that have downloaded to my device. For example, when I get into my car, I would like to just plug in my G1 to the audio port of the radio in the car, and press Play, which should automatically play what is in the Listen Queue. The Listen Queue should already have new episodes that I have not already heard so that I don’t have to manually refresh new subscriptions or new items on the device. What I describe is the power behind having a device that is always connected to the Internet and Listen does not talk full advantage of that capability.
Finally, there are some fundamental features that all podcast programs for mobile devices should have. One is the ability to remember how much of an episode that you have heard so that even if the device is restarted when you start playing it picks up on that episode right where you left off. It appears that Listen can do this, at least while the program is running, but I haven’t done thorough testing by shutting down the application to see if it truly remembers.
Because good podcast programs automatically download new episodes, which can take up a significant amount of storage space on a device (or even the hard drive on your PC), it is really important that the programs provide a way to automatically remove those episode files that have already been listened to. Some people might like keeping old episodes handy, but in most cases I only care to hear something once, so after it plays I would just as well have it deleted. After all, I should always be able to go back and re-download an episode if I want to hear it again. Listen does provide a way to clear the cache of episodes, but again it is a manual operation and really should be automated.
In short, Listen is an interesting good step, and I’ll keep it on my G1 for a while to see what progress Google makes on its development, however, I think Doggcatcher is a better, more full featured podcast application for Android that covers all of the shortcomings that Listen currently has.
Notes From The Cave 