I’ve been doing some podcast testing with the Q1 Ultra today but it’s taken me ages. Since I loaded up a set of podcasts feeds on the N82 set it to auto-update it’s been playing non-stop and has been distracting me! More about that later but for now, I wanted to show you how I’ve been testing lightweight podcasting and simultaneous Skype conversation recording on the Q1 Ultra. I’m actually quite surprised how stable the whole setup is and if I had the Q1 Ultra premium with the 1.33Ghz Core Solo, it would probably be stable enough to take a couple of simultaneous Skype calls and would be able to feed soundbytes into the mix too. No doubt this is all possible on the MacBook Air but the MBA doesn’t have 6 hours in-use battery life and an HSDPA modem for true mobility in an 800gm package does it! Most Ghz-class UMPCs should be able to do this under windows XP.
First take a look at the video (edited and rendered using the same ultra mobile PC while I wrote this article) and then listen to the quality of the recording using the link below.
(YouTube version here. Better VGA WMV version here.)
Listen to the test podcast here at podshow.com. I haven’t done any post-processing on the audio and I think it sounds OK. For anyone thinking about an ultra mobile podcasting solution, I can recommend this setup and if you want the ultimate in small but powerful podcasting setups, try the Sony UX or the Samsung Q1 Premium.
On the other end of the podcasting chain, the Nokia N82 is superb as a podcatcher. You can search for podcasts using a search tool, scan through a list of directories, load up any RSS-based podcast feed (audio and video) and set it to auto-update using Wifi or HSDPA. I have a 10-Euro per month 7.2mbps HSDPA (proxied HTTP) contract and I just set the N82 to update every hour. Wherever I am, it’s always downloading the latest episodes of my podcasts. No need for iTunes or any other podcatching middleware, this baby IS the podcatcher! One interesting side note is that although I’m not allowed to use my HSDPA contract on a PC, the N82 is currently downloading about 200MB of podcasts per day which is way more than I would normaly use on my UMPC! Add my normal browsing, emails, streaming radio, image uplaods and map downloads and it’s no wonder that I’m getting through 2 battery charges a day at the moment! I wonder how long it will be before Vodafone spot it and adjust their T&C’s to suit!
