I finally got around to listening to the Jason Calacanis, Dave Winer and Peter Rojas podcast where they discuss the viability of creating a podcast player. It’s definitely worth a listen. The focus of the player would be on listening and creating podcasts. It didn’t sound like they were trying to create an MP3 player and therein lies my biggest problem with such a device: I don’t want to carry around a Podcast player and and my iPod. I want to listen to my music and podcast from a single device. The iPod isn’t perfect for podcasts but it’s pretty darn good and it’s great for music.
Jason, Dave and Peter listed a number of features that their ideal podcast player would have. Among many are:
1. No DRM, period
2. Wi-Fi
3. Flash based (no hard drive due to short battery life)
4. Ability to record podcasts
5. Microphone
6. Possibly use Rockbox for base software
7. Winer mentioned he’d like to create a “platform” more than a “player” that developers can extend.
8. Support XML feeds, obviously
9. No desktop sync
I like all their idea and would buy such a device if it ever came to market. I still feel there’s much improvement to be made in how my iPod connects to iTunes. The software works for the most part but I’ve still run into problem of music and podcasts not making it over to the iPod automatically. I really like how the iPod works once the podcasts and music are on my player. But getting it there can be a pain. Winer mentioned someone he knew who had $2000 worth of iTunes music on her iPod and tried to sync to another computer and lost her entire collection.
WiFi would be a really cool feature. I’m not sure I’d share many podcasts but it would be nice to move content off my computer to the podcast player via WiFi instead of by USB cable. Or if I’m in a hotspot it would be nice to be able to download the latest podcasts based on the feeds I subscribe to.
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