![]() But such a cost is small compared to the hundreds of hours of listening you'll use it for during a calendar year and I'd argue that you should pick the interface and feature set that suits you best and shouldn't worry about the exact purchase price. It's true that this is commercial software (around £3, depending on which country you're in) and with no trial version, which contrasts with the other podcatchers on Windows Phone, almost all of which are either free or have trials. There's also the much publicised lack of support for video podcasts (cough, The Phones Show) and no way to import existing subscriptions from standard OPML files or even from gPodder or similar - instead you have to sync across from another platform or build your subscription set from scratch.īut let's not be negative here, Pocket Casts is still an efficient and effective podcatching engine, even with the caveats above. I'd expect these interface oddities to be picked up in the first major update to this Windows Phone client, expected soon. Or how about that you can swipe in the main 'hamburger' menu from the left edge of the UI but can't swipe it back again - you have to tap on the 'hamburger' icon or again use 'Back' instead. you're stuck, you can't swipe back and have to resort to the 'Back' Windows Phone control. For example, on the 'Now Playing' pane, you can swipe across to 'Up Next' and then again to 'Show Notes' and then. Throughout the user interface, gestures are inconsistent. ![]() Not that Pocket Casts is perfect - or at least not yet. ![]() It's true that most other podcatchers on Windows Phone have adopted some kind of time-sorted view, but few get close to the simplicity on offer here. Pocket Casts' UI has been honed by years on Android and it shows. The sync capability is the jewel in Pocket Casts' crown, but there are other attractive features for hardened podcast addicts on Windows Phone - the UI has, at its heart, (reverse) chronological lists, so that you can see at a glance what's new - no having to keep dipping into and out of other views or refreshing panes to try and spot new content. On the Nexus 6 on Android and on Windows Phone here, almost perfectly synced at every stage, across all platforms and all devices! As shown below, it's somewhat magical to see the main podcast listings kept in perfect step and you really can use different devices (or indeed, different Windows Phones, if you want to keep this all within the platform) to listen and never have to hear something twice by mistake or to ever have to think 'Now, did I already listen to that one on another device?' Your subscriptions are perfectly matched and playback positions synced within a few minutes. Which is all clever and comprehensive - and very useful to anyone (like me) with both Windows Phone and Android smartphones. The magic is made possible because Pocket Casts eschews Windows Phone platform services and other cloud syncing/importing solutions in favour of a custom server specially for the application, accessible from any platform, including the Web itself - there's a version of Pocket Casts that runs in a web browser! For anyone with a Windows Phone and a.n.other device running another smartphone or tablet platform, this is very much a unique selling point. Moreover, it arrives with the ability to sync not only podcast subscriptions but where you've got to in each, in your listening, across multiple devices and multiple platforms. ![]() Of which the latest - and arguably the best, depending on what you need - is Pocket Casts, arriving with a well-founded reputation on Android and iOS. Maybe the very fact that there was this gaping hole in the market was what encouraged developers to leap in with both feet, for we've since had twenty podcatching apps for the platform. You had to subscribe via Zune and then (if I remember right) access podcasts as part of the Music hub (in Windows Phone 7). ![]() Wind time back a couple of years and Windows Phone had no podcast applications at all. It may not have all the bells and whistles of Podcast Lounge, but for pure and fast, straight down the line audio podcast listening and management, Pocket Casts is hard to beat. Yes, yes, Pocket Casts does indeed arrive into a very crowded genre on Windows Phone, yes, it's still early days, there are some rough edges and there's no video podcast support yet, but I've been using it exclusively for the last week and have been pretty impressed overall. ![]()
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