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As I’ve stated before, I [heart] podcasts. The problem is that I don’t have my computer at home on every day to download new ones. This leaves me to listen to a week’s worth of American Public Media’s Marketplace a week after they air. That’s not very timely for a news program and would be even worse if I subscribed to the Morning Report.

I began looking at my web enabled cell phone as the answer. It has a speakerphone, so it can send out sound. It has Windows Media Player, so it must be able to play music. It has a web connection, so I can download podcasts on the go. I began playing around with Opera Mini and trying to use the RSS feed reader built in to subscribe to the Marketplace podcasts. No dice. I then looked around Handango InHand on my phone for a cheap podcatcher.

I found the AudioBay Podcast Player for $5.99. Even though Handango InHand thinks it does fit my phone, the Handango website doesn’t so I had to search by O/S instead of by phone. It does what I want it to do. I had to type in the feed manually off the Marketplace website, but then it instantly connected and downloaded the latest show.

Going through the little speakerphone speaker isn’t great, but it’s enough for a talk radio program. The EDGE connection could be faster (it’s about double dial-up speed), but I can simply set it to download when I get in the shower or start driving to work. I can connect via my wifi at home, so I’m going to attempt that as well. I’m still going to be using my iPod for all of my non-time sensitive podcasts, but my phone is certainly good enough to handle Marketplace and a couple of other news shows that go stale quickly.

Overall, I’d rate the experience exactly what I’d hoped for and that’s good enough for me.