Fellow mobilist Morten Hjerde has a very nice functionality and usability review of Nokia's Podcasting application; it's a good thoughtful read. It looks like Nokia committed all of Apple's podcasting errors and added a large set of their own. Oh, and it's an application for listening to podcasts, not actually podcasting.
A podcast listener is a tough application to design correctly. Consider some of its needs:
- integrate with the browser on the device, so appropriate links open up in the podcast app.
- handle information feeds of arbitrary formatting, with user-understood displays.
- integrate with voice call functionality, with appropriate pausing.
- monitor battery use, alerting the user a bit earlier than usual that the battery is running low and they may want to consider stopping the application so they can make voice calls.
- intelligent download/update management, respecting connection speeds & availability, storage available on the device, frequency with which a feed is updated and listened to, and so forth
- facilitate sharing with other listeners
- facilitate saving to some more permanent storage location
- intelligent use of meta-data
After all of the above, the application also needs to be great at actually listening to podcasts! Where did the user last leave off? When resuming after a minute or more, "rewind" the podcast by 10 seconds or so. Should a long delay rewind more? Should fast-forwarding jump a fixed number of seconds forward, or a percentage?
Interestingly, none of our clients or prospects appear to be thinking towards a podcast application on a phone. Perhaps the folks thinking in this direction have not yet invested in user experience, designing more for what the developers want rather than what users need.