Touch Me
It wasn’t so long ago we were trying to figure out how to support Sidepocast TV on the iPhone, even though we couldn’t get hold of one in this country. Well, last weekend, the kind souls at Apple released iPod touch in the UK.
For the uninitiated, the iPod Touch is an iPhone minus the phone bit, so you get all the widescreen-touchscreen goodness, without the vast expense of a cellphone contract.
For research purposes Sidepodcast invested in the latest and greatest in podcasting consumer electronics, here’s a piccy:
Straight out of the box all of our content played perfectly. If you subscribe to the Enhanced Podcast Feed everything works as it did in previous pod-incarnations, only more fluidly.
The fingertip control is gorgeous to the point of disbelief and 16:9 video looks simply stunning. An unexpected bonus was improvements made to Enhanced Podcast playback. Chapter selection appears in a fabulous flip-and-scroll list while embedded images are bigger and sharper. As more people get their hands on this model (or an iPhone), enhanced shows are really going to come into their own.
That said, all is not perfect inside ‘touch world’. The product comes with built-in wifi and a Web browser (this site looks great without needing to make changes), but there is no ability to find / subscribe to new podcasts, nor is there anyway to keep existing subscriptions up-to-date. That’s a pretty major omission given that you can purchase music using the built in iTunes software, but nothing more. If you need to manage podcasts, you’ll find yourself having to return to your PC each time.
There’s no particular technical reason for this lack of functionality, you could perhaps assume tight deadlines prevented an inclusion, and that maybe someday the oversight will get fixed. One hopes so in any case.
Despite these criticisms, in terms of keeping up with all your favourite podcasts, there is no better device, anywhere.
October 2nd, 2007 at 9:55 pmChristine said:
Ha.
May 5th, 2008 at 5:26 pmVideo Podcast Chapters | Sidepodcast : Your Weekly F1 Podcast said:
[...] talked about how good the iTouch is for viewing widescreen video podcasts before, but this software update added something unique - a chapter [...]