Pocket Casts might just be the most attractive podcast app I’ve seen for Android so far. It’s not necessarily the most powerful or full-featured, but Pocket Casts is also pretty easy to use for finding and subscribing to podcasts, downloading the latest episodes, and automatically deleting them when you’re done listening. Normally the app costs $2.70, but it’s available for free from the Amazon Appstore
The app is divided into several sections. From the home screen you can see thumbnail icons for all of your subscriptions, along with numbers showing how many episodes are available.
The second screen is a now playing window with nice big icons for skipping forward or back, altering your position on a timeline, or adjusting the volume. You can also load show notes from this screen.
Next there’s a screen showing the latest episodes from all of your episodes. You can click the wireless icon to stream a podcast over the internet, or the download link to… well, download it to your mobile device.
The fourth window is for podcast discovery. You can enter a podcast by name in the search bar or use the provided tools to find what you’re looking for. I had much better luck with the search bar since, for instance, some of my favorite NPR podcasts didn’t show up in the NPR listing under “Podcast Networks.”
The final screen lets you adjust settings. For instance, you can change the skip forward and skip back intervals, choose whether to store downloaded podcasts on your SD card or phone, enable automatic checking for new episodes, and decide whether episodes should be deleted automatically after you’ve finished listening.
I still prefer BeyondPod, which offers advanced options such as the ability to determine how many episodes to download or how long to keep older episodes of a podcast on a feed-by-feed basis. But BeyondPod costs $6.99, making it more than twice as expensive as Pocket Casts even when the newer app isn’t available as a free download… which it is… today only.
