Status-Q

Some questions for you:

• How often do you use the speakerphone facility on your mobile? If you’re like me, only very occasionally.
• How often do you get the urge to listen to music through the (probably mono) speaker or headset on your mobile? Again, I would suggest, probably not often. Even the cheapest iPod will do a much better job.
• How often, when listening to podcasts while shaving, do you wish that your iPod had built-in speakers so you don’t have to keep plugging it into those speakers with the battery that runs down and makes Leo Laporte sound like a dalek? Well, there may be fewer of you here, but I’m sure you can at least sympathise with those of us for whom this is a source of distress.

So I’m quite intrigued by the new software that I’ve just installed on my Nokia E61: Nokia’s Podcasting application. This is not, as the name might suggest, something that lets you create podcasts on the phone, but something that lets you subscribe to, download and listen to them. And the phone’s audio, limited and monophonic though it may be, is just fine for most podcasts, either through earphone or through the loudspeaker – speech is what it was designed for, after all!

This would also be a good way to generate phenomenally large phone bills if I were charged per megabyte for my 3G connection, or if I couldn’t set the phone to do the downloads via my wifi connection. And I’ll have to watch my settings carefully. My real worry is that I’ll accidentally go abroad and the application will download the latest episode of TWiT over a roaming GSM connection, which would, I calculate, cost me something in the region of £280.