Nexus And Me - Podcasts

I am a big fan of podcasts, in fact I listen to them so much I occasionally  go a week without listening to any music.

When I got my Nokia it was a revolution to be able to download podcasts directly to my device.

But Nokia's podcatcher has some issues:

It is difficult to set up - URLs must be put in manually, because the built-in search only finds podcasts that were around four years ago.

The most crippling problem however is that Nokia podcatcher occasionally just stops working. It simply dies and refuses to open again. The only solution is to hard reset the phone.

On Android you have choices, lots of choices.

After trying a few different podcatching apps (including listen and mypod) I have settled on a very good free app called MediaFly.

Mediafly is great because it allows you to:

Manage your podcasts online.

Stream/download podcasts.

Stream/download video podcasts.

So... mediafly literally does everything I want and more.

Mediafly does have issues though:

As with every podcasting application I've tried on Android, Mediafly occasionally fails to find updates I know (because I subscribe to the same RSS feed in Google Reader) are out. (This issue might be caused by Meteor, my carried blocking ports. But I definitely never had it on the 5800.)

-Rory

Nexus And Me - Twitter

I know it might seem odd to start with Twitter, but ever since I first purchased a data plan some months ago the functionality and quality of my Twitter application has been paramount for me.

The Symbian OS has what I consider to the be the best Twitter application in the world.

It's called Gravity and its developer Janole has become something of a hero to me by keeping his users up to date on his latest activities on his twitter stream, and generally fighting the good fight for Symbian.

On the NexusOne there are many, many twitter applications. I have tried a few, here are my problems with them:

Failure to connect:
Several clients simply refuse to work on my data network the two best ones are:
Seesmic & Tweetcaster

Some clients worked but were overly reliant on the menu button, which kills it for me for example:
TwitterRide & Swift

The clients I use can thus be said to have run the gauntlet they are:
Twidroid: The old reliable of the android platform, Twidroid is a favourite of many users who have been using android since the G1 came out.
Twidroid can be relied upon to work, it's not pretty and the on-screen buttons are too damn small but it always works.
&
Twicca: My current favourite is the very dark and very cool Twicca. Twicca offers more customisation that almost any of the other options. It has a funny way of finding tweets but not loading them until you go to look at them. Sadly the buttons are still a bit small and the menu button is relied upon a bit too much for my liking. (You can sort of work around it with the back button).
But when it comes right down to it Twicca is just beautiful, you can even colour-code your tweets.

I don't have root access to take a screenshot, so here is one from the web. (The developer is Japanese, so they have a big following in Asia).