Since I picked up my Google Nexus One a few months ago, I’ve tried a number of different tools for downloading and listening to podcasts.
Google Listen is a free podcast manager from podcast manager from Google which makes it easy to find, subscribe to, and listen to podcasts. But I find that it’s a bit unpredictable when it comes to actually downloading the podcasts. When I fire up the app, I usually have to manually start downloading an episode before I can listen to it. And I’m amazed how often Listen will start to download a podcast only to stop after a few megabytes — something I usually don’t notice until I’m about 10 minutes into a podcast and suddenly the audio stops.
I’ve also tried configuring my PC and Android phone to automatically sync podcasts from iTunes to the Nexus One. This works reasonably well, but it requires you to connect your phone to your PC regularly.
BeyondPod is a full featured podcast manager for Android that does pretty much everything you need on the phone itself — no PC needed. You can search for and subscribe to podcasts or import feeds from an OPML feed or from Google Reader.
You can also configure BeyondPod to automatically update all of your feeds on a regular basis so that episodes are ready for you to listen to as soon as you hit the play button. I’ve been testing BeyondPod for the past week, and it’s set up to automatically check for new episodes while I sleep so that most mornings I have something new to listen to.
BeyondPod is available as a free download from the Android Market, but in order to use all the features (such as scheduling downloads), you’ll want to purchase the BeyondPod Unlock Key which costs $6.99. The free version of the software comes with a 7 day trial so you can use all of the pro features for a week before deciding whether to pony up $7.
