Android, Podcasts and Cloud Syncing

For development purposes, I have both an iPhone and a Google Nexus One running Android. For development purposes… or that’s what I tell myself. The iPhone 3GS is what I use as my everyday device for email, surfing, phone calls, podcasts & music, time tracking and to-do lists, etc. I got the Nexus One purely so I’d have an actual piece of hardware running Android for testing software that I develop on it.

But I recently got tired and fed up of having to tether my iPhone to my Mac just to get the latest podcasts downloaded to it. I thought I’d give Google Listen on the N1 a try. Google Listen maintains your subscribed podcast feed lists in the cloud. If you use Google Reader (and you should) you’ll see them in a folder called “Listen Subscriptions”. You can subscribe or unsubscribe to new podcasts there. You can also use Reader’s import feature to import an OPML file listing all your podcast feeds, which you can export from iTunes.

Android’s Google Listen app accesses that list and automatically downloads new podcast episodes periodically… over WiFi or both WiFi and 3G, depending upon how you configure it.

Now I’ve heard the rumors that Apple is working on wireless syncing for iTunes. Maybe it’ll even be announced at this fall’s usual “new iPods” event. And that’ll be great… as long as it’s got wireless syncing to the cloud and not just wireless syncing to your Mac. I want to be able to download new podcasts when I’m 50 miles away from my sleeping or completely unpowered Mac.

Google Listen does this. It’s not perfect, though. It doesn’t store track locations in the cloud. So I can’t listen to half of an MDN Show podcast on a Nexus One and then go get in the car and fire up an EVO and pick up listening right where I left off. The fact that I don’t have an EVO notwithstanding, why can’t I do this? I can do this with ebooks using the Kindle software running on all the computers and devices I have. iBooks does it on the iPhone and iPad. Google Listen is still in Google’s “Labs” section, so its even more “beta” than their normal offerings, so I hope that’s a feature that will get added as time goes on. It would also be nice if they would create apps for the iPhone, iPod and iPad and the Mac and Windows. Or… maybe a web app is necessary in case Apple rejects a Google Listen app for the iDevices.

Also, I like to listen to podcasts at night as I go to sleep. But if I do, the thing will stay on all night and burn through 6 or 7 hours worth of podcasts while I sleep and I’ll have to go through and find them all the next day and mark them as un-listened again so I can hear them. It’d be nice if there was a sleep option that would turn Listen off after an hour or some other configurable time period. Or an option to play the ‘casts in the queue but not mark them as “listened”. But maybe that’s just me. Your mileage may vary.

The best place to listen to podcasts is, of course, the car. I have one car that has a USB connection that looks for all locally stored audio files and lets you navigate them with the dashboard controls. It also has an auxiliary input jack. But I don’t use either of those. I don’t yet know whether the USB connection will work with Listen. I don’t know if the Listen app stores the downloaded audio as individual audio files or in a database file. If it’s a database then it won’t work with the USB connection. My other car has no audio input method at all except a cassette deck that no longer works. I wore it out using it with iPods and iPhones via a cassette adapter.

My solution for listening in the car with the Nexus One? I’ve been using the Nexus One Car Dock. It has its own built-in speaker which is good enough for podcasts but I wouldn’t want to use it for music. Its good enough, that is, except in noisy conditions. Last night it was raining very hard and the Dock speaker couldn’t compete with the sound of the rain on the car roof. But 90% of the time its fine. It’s also useful in using the Nexus One as a GPS since it attaches to the windshield with a suction cup.

But note that neither Google Listen nor the iPhone’s iPod app have good user interfaces for the car. They should have a “car mode” with big buttons spaced far apart and a “night” mode with black backgrounds and dark green text and buttons to not kill your night vision. Its best to just start it up and let Listen’s queue or an iPod app’s playlist play and not mess with them.

Unfortunately, Google has recently ended sale of the Nexus One, which I think is a great device. But everything I wrote here applies to any Android device except for the car dock. Each device would have to have its own car (and desktop) docking solution. But the docks I’ve seen for several of the different types of Android phones have all seemed to be of high quality… except for the Nexus One Desktop Dock. While the Nexus One car dock is great, the desktop dock is lousy. It’s hard to get the N1 seated in the dock so that it makes contact with the connectors and there’s nothing holding the phone it place. I have literally seen my N1 just fall right off of the desktop dock.

So… to sum up… Google Listen is great if your prime desire is for wireless syncing of podcast subscriptions from the cloud. The iPod app on the iPhone or iPod Touch still has more features and, of course, a much nicer user interface. For music, I’m still using the iPhone. But unless and until Apple rolls out wireless downloading of podcasts from the cloud (not wireless syncing to my Mac) I’ll be listening to podcasts on my Nexus One. But if Apple does roll that out? *sigh* I’d switch back. *hangs head*