This week Google Labs released a new application for listening to podcasts on Google Android phones, called Listen. A one word assessment of this application is that it is an alpha release, and after trying it out a bit, I have to wonder whether the people who wrote the application actually subscribe to and listen to podcasts. Basically, Listen is a slightly kicked up media player that allows you to search for media to play from a variety of podcasts. It seems to be optimized for finding and playing, for one time, a podcast which works for checking out podcasts or finding something on a whim that you want to listen to.

The problem is that the power behind podcasts is the subscription model where after you subscribe to a podcast you then automatically get new episodes when they are released. As far as I can tell, Listen does not automatically retrieve new episodes, you have to go into My Subscriptions when it then checks for new episodes. Another big problem is with the process for adding subscriptions. Just about every podcast player that I have used provides a way for you to manually add a podcast feed, which is really just an RSS feed with an enclosure, even if it has a directory of popular podcasts. There is no way to manually add a podcast to Listen, so if the search function doesn’t find the podcast that you are looking for, you are not going to hear it in Listen.

The relationship between the Listen Queue and Subscriptions is confusing. What I expected is that the Listen Queue would have new episodes, while My Subscriptions is for managing your subscriptions. Right now the Listen Queue is a playlist to which you manually add the episodes that you want to listen too. I like the idea of being able to manually create a playlist of episodes, but how I normally a podcast program for is to just start playing the new episodes that have downloaded to my device. For example, when I get into my car, I would like to just plug in my G1 to the audio port of the radio in the car, and press Play, which should automatically play what is in the Listen Queue. The Listen Queue should already have new episodes that I have not already heard so that I don’t have to manually refresh new subscriptions or new items on the device. What I describe is the power behind having a device that is always connected to the Internet and Listen does not talk full advantage of that capability.

Finally, there are some fundamental features that all podcast programs for mobile devices should have. One is the ability to remember how much of an episode that you have heard so that even if the device is restarted when you start playing it picks up on that episode right where you left off. It appears that Listen can do this, at least while the program is running, but I haven’t done thorough testing by shutting down the application to see if it truly remembers.

Because good podcast programs automatically download new episodes, which can take up a significant amount of storage space on a device (or even the hard drive on your PC), it is really important that the programs provide a way to automatically remove those episode files that have already been listened to. Some people might like keeping old episodes handy, but in most cases I only care to hear something once, so after it plays I would just as well have it deleted. After all, I should always be able to go back and re-download an episode if I want to hear it again. Listen does provide a way to clear the cache of episodes, but again it is a manual operation and really should be automated.

In short, Listen is an interesting good step, and I’ll keep it on my G1 for a while to see what progress Google makes on its development, however, I think Doggcatcher is a better, more full featured podcast application for Android that covers all of the shortcomings that Listen currently has.

As a long time PDA and smartphone user, I pay attention to the number of people that I see using iPhones, Blackberries, or Windows Mobile phones. I first started using a PDA in 1993 back when Doonsbury was making fun of the Newton MessagePad and few people actually used these devices.

Perhaps as only as far back as 3 years ago I might be the only person in the room with a smartphone. Times have changed. Now Blackberries have become must-have accessories for the 20-something crowd. So, I appreciate James Kendrick’s comments on CNET’s article on modern power moms flocking to smartphones.

I am curious though, about whether the smartphones are being fully utilized. I expect that many Blackberry users are doing e-mail and connecting to Facebook and Twitter, but aren’t using the address book or the calendar. They probably only use a handful of applications.

Still, the fact that smartphones are becoming must-have tools for mothers speaks to the changes that have occurred with these devices in recent years. Three years ago you could easily pay $500 for a smartphone, which was too expensive to be practical, not to mention the risk of being lost or broken. Now you can buy an iPhone for $99, and you might even be able to get a Blackberry for free with a new plan at many wireless providers. Another big change is that the software has become simple enough to be useful, and powerful enough with the installation of different programs to be tailored for a person’s needs.

My guess is that many new smartphone users would not imagined owning one three years. They probably didn’t see the need nor thought that it was useful. So if you are surprised to find yourself a smartphone user today, I am interested in hearing how you are using yours and what was it that pushed you towards buying one.

I like irony. I find delicious irony in the fact that one of the books that Amazon recently automatically wiped from people’s Kindle was George Orwell’s 1984. (That link begs the question, if I can read 1984 free online, why couldn’t one keep a paid copy on their Kindle?) A few weeks ago I celebrated with my high school classmates the 25 years since we graduated in 1984. Sadly, it is beginning to look like Orwell’s prediction for 1984 could only be off by 50 years (or less).

Check out the video demonstration of Apple’s new video streaming techology included in iPhone OS 3.0. As I wrote about in my last blog post, I think video streaming on mobile phones is going to have a significant impact on how we get news and information in the near future, and improvements to video streaming that compensates for the quality of wireless connections to maintain decent quality video is going to be important. This type of video streaming optimization will be important even with faster 4G wireless connectivity because in most cases the quality of wireless connection is dependent on many factors such as where you are located (inside a brick building, riding in a car) and how many people are connected (everyone tries to connect to watch the lastest CNN update on Mike Jackson’s death.) It’s good to see Apple make improvements to the “plumbing” that will help their mobile device.

The volume of quality applications for Android is on a crescendo, with the increasing availability of some popular applications that have been available for other mobile phones. One such application is Qik, which is an amazing application that streams live video on the Internet using mobile phones with video cameras. Video streaming is the type of thing we use as a reference when talking about the speed of wireless networks, such as 3G is needed for streaming video; 4G is needed for streaming high quality video.

Two weeks ago when the election in Iran appeared to be rigged, people in Iran began to revolt and many of us first learned about it on Twitter. Twitter provided us with first hand accounts of what was happening in Iran before main stream media. Imagine if addition to Twitter these people had Qik on their phones and were able to stream live video of what was happening. As they say, a picture says a thousand words.

My point is that tools like Qik are going to be very important, and if you think about how they work, it’s pretty amazing, so it is fun to play with. From a little device in my hand I can broadcast video that millions of people around the world can see, that very instant. You could not imagine being able to do something like live video streaming from mobile phones five years ago, back then we were just happy to have our e-mail pushed to our phones at near the same time it arrived on the mail server.

Qik has been available for some time on other mobile devices and the Android version is an early release, but as you can see, it functions very well. The video quality coming from my G1 is limited by the camera, which doesn’t quickly adjust for lighting conditions. Remember that most of the broadcast video that we are used to seeing has lighting to make everything clearly visible and the cameras they use have adjustable apertures to enable the camera operator to allow the right amount of light into the shot.

Apparently Qik caches the video recording to the device before streaming/uploading it to the Internet, which is why I learned that if you don’t have any space on your storage card the program will not work. This also means that you will need to remember to remove the video files from your card after they have been uploaded.

You can configure Qik to automatically send a message via Twitter that you are streaming live, and when someone clicks the URL that is included, they will be able to see the video that you are recording live. Obviously, there is a delay in the stream. In a test I propped my camera on a table, opened the live stream on my netbook, walked in front of the camera, and sat back down to later see myself in front of the camera, and that was on Wi-Fi as opposed to 3G.

Yes, network speed matters. While Qik will stream over Edge, viewers will find it frequently pausing. It does appear that you can upload the video over Edge and viewers should have a better time seeing the recording as opposed to the live stream. The good news is that the current version of Qik for Android is only an alpha release and yet is pretty functional, but it will get much better. It can be used right now for recording and streaming video from Android phones, and you can share that video on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. If you have a Android phone, I think it is worth trying out.

With more people using mobile phones to access the Web, developers are trying to make it easier for users to access web sites without having to type in a long URL. Generally speaking, lots of typing is bad on a mobile. A solution for mobile phones that have automatic focus is QR bar codes. The idea is that a web site or printed advertisement displays the bar code, you point your phone’s camera at the bar code and the software scans the code and then opens up the web site.

This idea has been around for a while, but this evening is the first time that I actually encountered such a bar code in a situation that was useful. I learned about a to-do list manager for Android called Shuffle via its web site and after reading about it, I was interested enough to download it. My first reaction was to fire up Android Market on my G1, but then I saw the bar code, and as luck would have it I just installed a QR bar code scanner last night, so I fired up the program on my phone, pointed the camera at the bar code and it focused on the code, scanned it, and offered to open a web site, which I tapped OK. Android Market then started with the program displayed for me to download and install, in all it was a pretty easy process and will keep me on the lookout for more QR codes to use in the future.

One of the reasons why I like Android and I am sticking with it despite it’s shortcomings is that it has so many capabilities just waiting for developers to exploit. Clearly an important one of those capabilities is the GPS and compass, which can be used to develop augmented reality applications. Imagine that instead of having somone or something tell you that the restroom was ahead of you and to the right you could hold up your phone and it showed you using the phone’s camera exactly where the restroom was. Or imagine being able to hold your phone up to the night sky and have it show you the names of the stars and constellations that you are looking at. These are examples of the next step in mobile application development that is happening right now.

It is just a little under one week since my G1 was updated to the “Cupcake” version (version 1.5) of the Google Android operating system. So far one of the conclusions that I have drawn is that this version of the operating system is a lot less stable on my G1. I am seeing far more “Force Quit / Wait” messages popping up while using both downloaded and built-in applications. My gut says that there is simply not enough memory on the G1 to support all the new features that Cupcake adds. My understanding is that Android is largely based on Java, in which case garbage collection is an important function to optimizing memory. Hopefully the situation can be improved through optimization of the applications that I run, and that is going to take time.

I suspect that there are two big contributors to this situation: auto screen rotation and animations. Screen rotation may be the main culprit because something has to be continuously running to detect the position of the device and rotate the screen. Likewise, animations have to be taking up some resources.

Amongst the new features that I have tried this past week are the new home screen widgets. One of my favorite features of Android is the home screen, which is actually three home screens that you switch to by swiping your finger left or right across the screen. Just like on the desktop of a PC, you can add icons to launch applications, folders to contain application icons, and widgets, which are tiny programs that provide a quick way to access information without loading a larger application. Widgets were one of the things hyped about Android when it was first announced, but never really realized that hype in the first major release of the operating system.

Initially Android came with just a few widgets. A analog clock, a picture widget to display thumbnail size pictures, and a search widget to quick do a search on Google. Not many widgets were developed by third parties and made available in the Android Market. Cupcake intends to change this by including more widgets with the operating system to generate more interest. I now have the Calendar widget on the main home screen, which displays the next appointment on my calendar, and that is handy for quickly providing at-a-glance information on the phone.

There is a media player widget that have placed on the “right” home screen to try it out, but I don’t have much music on my G1 so I have removed it. I have downloaded two widgets from the Android Market, the Dilbert widget that displays the day’s Dilbert strip, and the Yahoo News widget that displays headlines of the Yahoo News RSS feed. The Dilbert widget is cool with the auto screen rotation because it enables you to quickly display the strip in landscape to that you can see the entire strip on the screen.

The next feature that I am going to explorer is Live Folders, which I think is supposed to provide RSS feeds in a folder on the Android home screens, however, so far all that I have found are folders for displaying different views of my Contacts.

Yesterday afternoon after I returned home from my travels through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, my T-Mobile G1 downloaded and installed the Cupcake update to Android, which is the update that I wrote about earlier in the month. I will need more time to discover all of the new things that Cupcake provides, but here are my initial impressions. First off the device feels a little snappier, which I am glad to see because it is going to be important for Android to be successful that performance continues to improve. A good performing phone should have no lags in switching between applications or features, and in my opinion the first release of Android was not a good performing operating system.

Gmail is now where it should have been when Android was first released. It now provides batch operations like selecting a bunch of e-mails to be deleted or to be assigned to a particular label. One of the main functions for using e-mail on a mobile device is e-mail triage, and that was not really possible in the first release. Now when I first check my e-mail in the morning on my phone it will be easier to select the messages that I just want to delete without opening. (Some spam, but in most cases subscriptions that I can tell from the subject that I am not interested in reading.)

Some of the new features are not enabled by default, most noteable is the auto rotation feature that automatically switches the screen from portrait to landscape. Previous to Cupcake you had to open the keyboard to switch the screen, but now all have to do is change the orientation of the device, provided you turn on the feature. Select Settings, Sound & Display and select Orientation to switch orientation automatically when rotating phone. Another feature that I enabled on this screen is Animation. I don’t recall whether animation was available in the prior version, but after I turned it on to check it out I made a discovery. The animation feature adds the appearance of faster switching between fuctions & applications. I suspect that this is a trick that gives your eyes something to see while loading the application. When I tap a button and nothing happens, I translate that as a pause and a delay, but when I tap and the screen wipes, something is happening and therefore it doesn’t appear as slow. I just noticed that this same thing happens by default on my iPod Touch, and in the iPod’s case there is no way that I can see to turn the animations off.

The on-screen keyboard is going to present a dillema for me. It appears as though the next available Android phone in the U.S. will not have a physical keyboard, so if I want to get the newest device, I need ot live with an on-screen keyboard. Ironically, I have grown to like the physical keyboard on my devices, and both the HTC Tytnn II and the T-Mobile G1 have them. For years I used Pocket PCs without keyboards and found the stylus and writing on the screen a very good way to input text, so I did not like the small thumb keyboads. The G1 has no handwriting or character recognition so you have to use a keyboard, in which case right now I think a physical keyboard is better than the on-screen keyboards that iPhone/iPod Touch uses. While I could use a stylus on the Tytnn II I found that since I am now used to a physical keyboard on the G1, I also default to using it on the Tytnn. It may be even faster to slide open the keyboard on the Tytnn II versus popping out the stylus and opening the soft input panel.

I have had limited use of Android’s new on-screen keyboard, and I am going to force myself to use it so that I can make a good determination of whether I can live with just an on-screen keyboard versus a physical keyboard. Composing e-mails and posting items on Facebook or Twitter will be good tests. There are some changes I made to the keyboard setting by going into Settings, Locale & Text. First, you have to select Android Keyboard to actually enable the on-screen keyboard, then expand the Android Keyboard settings to enable some functions such as vibrate on keypress, sound on keypress, and auto-capitalization. Vibrate and sound provide feedback that a keypress has been recognized (the iPhone has sound but does not vibrate) and for now I am testing both.

An important function of on-screen keyboards is predictive word recognition, which is the feature on the iPhone/iPod Touch that allows you mistype letters and continue typing because the device determines from the proximity and pattern of the letters what word you meant to type. I think that without this feature on-screen keyboards do not work because there is no way you are going to press every letter perfectly on the screen, and you would go crazy with always correcting mistakes without it. A problem with the iPhone is that it’s word recognition is sometimes wrong and I have had situations where it refuses to use the word I really want. Android attempts to fix this by displaying multiple possible words. The one it thinks you want will be highlighted and is entered when you press the space button, like on the iPhone, but you can tap one of the other words displayed if Android guesses wrong.

After a few uses of the on-screen keyboard I think it works well, but I think the thickness of the G1 is going to be a problem. When I switch to landscape and type on the screen the G1 feels too thick. It might be because I am used to sliding out the physical keyboard, so I might get over it, but it also might be that on-screen keyboards work best with thinner devices. BTW, word prediction does not work if you use the physical keyboard, and I am wondering whether or not I prefer that it did. The physical & on-screen keyboard debate is going to be big for Android users because unlike the iPhone, you will have the option of which you want. The debate will come down to size versus function. For people that insist that a thin, light device is important, they will find a way to live with the on-screen keyboard, while those who cannot get used to the on-screen keyboard will find a way to live with a slightly larger and heavier device. These type of options are what make Android more appealing than iPhone to me.

This morning I read an article about how Apple could block the Palm Pre from syncing with iTunes, and I am thinking that it would be a bad thing for Apple to pursue this type of tactic. Occasionally in talk about antitrust issues in the tech industry I hear comments about how Apple has a monopoly with iTunes and the iPod. I think that as iTunes gained more and more share of total music sales, the case for the claim of it being a monopoly was growing. Apple’s move to remove DRM from the majority of music it sells on iTunes was a step towards diffusing that claim because it broke the iTunes/iPod lock-in that it’s DRM created. Now that you can buy MP3 tracks from iTunes that will play on any MP3 player and computer, it would appear that antitrust claims disappear, but if Apple starts to appear to be intentionally making it difficult for consumers to put MP3 tracks on the player of their choice, it will start drawing more attention for bad monopolistic practices, the same practices that Apple and others in Silicon Valley railed against Microsoft for.

In this age it seems to me that going after large corporations for antitrust violations is a tool that administrations have used to gain favor with constituents. Particularly in this time when there is much anger against corporations, I think Apple would be wise to not draw attention to itself. Apple should resist the urge of favoring the iPod over other company’s players with iTunes, in fact, I think it would be smart for them to make it easy for any player or phone (Zune, Palm Pre, Windows Mobile, etc..) to sync with iTunes. They defintely should not be intentionally preventing other players from syncing music.