It never really struck me until I bought myself a Nokia N95. I won’t go into the technical wonders of this machine (but it is pretty amazing) but suffice to say that
- it has the ability to connect to a wireless network (like your home network)
- it has a fairly decent speaker on it
- there is a podcasting application available for it
Prior to my purchasing the phone I tried to get into this whole podcasting thing (internet audio programs) but for some reason, that escaped me at the time, I never quite got it. I was able to find podcasts that interested me but I never enjoyed listening to them. I tried downloading the podcasts to my laptop, putting on my big headphones, and listening to them but it just didn’t feel right. I tried downloading the podcasts using Juice, a podcast receiver, and transferring the podcasts to my iPod, but again it just didn’t work - it was too awkward, took too much time, too much hassle.
Now, thanks to my N95, I can go home and press a button on my phone, my favourite podcasts get downloaded to my phone and on my way to work the next day I can listen to them using the phones’ speaker. All very simple, very convenient, hassle free and just works.
It was never about the content of the podcasts, that was always fine, it was how I was digesting that content that was the problem.