Last time we looked at doubleTwist, the application already provided one of the best solutions for syncing your computers music and podcast collection to an Android phone. This week the folks at doubleTwist released two major updates that make things even better.
First up, there’s a new version of the doubleTwist app for Windows which includes an Android Market search function. While Google hasn’t yet launched a way to search the Android Market without actually holding an Android phone in your hands, a number of third party solutions have popped up, and the doubleTwist app search engine is about as good as any I’ve seen.
The front page is divided into featured, top paid, and top free apps. You can also enter a search term and click on any item in the results for more details. Unfortunately there’s no click-to-download-to-your-phone feature, but each listing has a QR code which you can scan with your phone’s camera to open up the download link in the Android Market on your device. It’s not quite as easy as using iTunes to download apps to an iPhone, but it’s pretty close.

The second major release this week was the launch of a doubleTwist media player for Android phones. The doubleTiwst android app is available for a limited time as a free download from the Android Market. Once the promotion ends, it will cost $0.99 to download.
To be honest, the doubleTwist Android app doesn’t have many features that you won’t find in the default Android music and video apps right now. But it’s a lot nicer to look at. And more importantly, the audio and video players are together at last in a single app. If you want to play a video using the default Android apps, you have to open the photo gallery, which seems kind of silly to me.
The doubleTwist app for Android also lets you import iTunes playlists and it has support for podcasts. If there’s a killer feature though, it’s integration with the desktop doubleTwist media player. You can rate songs on your Android phone and the ratings will be copied to your desktop. Playcounts and ther data are also transfered.
Eventually doubleTwist plans to add support for wireless media synchronization and internet radio to the Android app.
You can find more photos after the break.