I’m used to having the audio episodes delivered weekly to my Android phone over the air using the Doggcatcher podcast app, and hoped I might be able to get the video episodes in the same way. That is, I would like Doggcatcher to alert me automatically to a new episode and have it right there on the phone waiting for me to watch.  But the video episodes, being on YouTube, can only be streamed. They are not for download and not associated with any convenient RSS feed. On the face of it I can’t use Doggcatcher to help me at all. The best I can do is to subscribe on YouTube, to get email reminders. Worse, I am only offered the option to subscribe for the geekandsundry YouTube channel output as a whole, not just the Sword & Laser show.

The good news is that there is a solution of sorts.  Not a complete solution – there is no practical way around the inability to download the shows – but there is a way to use Doggcatcher to manage access to and consumption of the video episodes more or less in the same way as a conventional podcast.

The partial fix involves use of Yahoo Pipes. Yes, it still exists.  Thankfully, the implementation is trivial as explained below. And I didn’t even have to create a new Pipe –  I found an existing Pipe which does exactly what I need. The Pipe in question is “YouTube tags to RSS” by Eric. When the Pipe runs, it takes  a series of keywords as inputs, picks out only those YouTube videos having tags which match the keywords, and presents those videos as an RSS feed.

I found the first episode of the Sword & Laser show on YouTube and picked out all those tags which would not vary from episode to episode (I picked “Geek and Sundry”, “Sword and Laser”,” Veronica Belmont” and “Tom Merritt”), used them with the Pipe and selected “Get as RSS”. I used the URL of the resulting RSS feed to define a new feed on Doggcatcher.

This is the URL:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=qLeMq8782xG2oyVwCB2yXQ&_render=rss&tags=Geek+and+Sundry+ Sword+and+Laser+Veronica+Belmont+Tom+Merritt

(If you copy and paste it make sure you eliminate any stray spaces)

All I can say is that it worked, and the exact same URL should work just as well for anyone. The tagging was clearly right because the only items in the feed were the pilot episode, first episode and bonus interview episode from the new Sword & Laser show, and the three episodes were added to the “downloaded video” queue where they appear together with the normal run of video podcasts.  The only difference is that the Sword & Laser video items are presented as stream only items, reflecting that they are on YouTube not actually downloaded to the phone.  When selected, they open automatically in the YouTube app and play.  This is nearly as good as if they were normal video podcasts except I have to be somewhere with connectivity before I can actually watch them.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that this approach somehow magically turns a YouTube show into a genuine podcast. What it does is allow me to use a single app to capture the availability of new material relating to both both true podcasts and YouTube shows, and to launch them both from that same app. This is far more convenient than the alternatives.

The same idea would work with any YouTube show that can be uniquely identified through tags.  You don’t even need to go into Yahoo Pipes as such. You just need to provide the podcatcher app with the right URL.

Start with the URL below:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=qLeMq8782xG2oyVwCB2yXQ&_render=rss&tags=tag1+tag2+tag3

Replace tag1, tag2, etc with the relevant tags to identify the show.  You can use as many tags as you need.  Just paste the edited URL into Doggcatcher, or other preferred podcatcher app, when setting up a new feed. When it updates the feed, the podcatcher will run the Pipe and pick up any new items.

The size is noticeable but does not stop me enjoying the phone. It fits in my jacket or trouser pocket. The worst it gets is that it can be a bit uncomfortable in my trouser pocket if I am tying up my shoelaces or sitting in the car. In the latter case I just leave it on the console while I’m driving.

People complain you can’t use it one handed. I can, just about, with care, but very rarely need to. I was well used to using my old Galaxy S with both hands anyway. I prefer to use it that way.

All in all, the downsides to the size are way more than offset by the benefits. I think all the furore about the size comes from iPhone users who have been conditioned by Apple to regard a 3.5″ screen as the “right” size for a phone and have never had the experience of living with anything bigger. It is not an Apple product and Apple does not offer anything comparable so they feel obliged to make fun of it. People who actually try the Galaxy Note tend to fall for it. The 5 million sales in 5 months show there are enough people who have cottoned on to how good it is.

The big wins for me are:

Video – the screen size and quality mean I can really enjoy films or video podcasts very conveniently, say on the train or a plane, without having to worry about bringing a full size tablet or setting up a laptop.

eBooks – the Note’s screen is only a little bit smaller than say a Kindle Keyboard, and just as easy to read.  Even in bright sunlight because the screen can be turned up very bright, and all from within the Kindle Android app. I have a Kindle Keyboard but no longer really need it.

Note taking – is for real, not just an excuse to give the phone a catchy name. I use the S Pen a lot more than I expected to. On my recent cruise I was using it to take screen caps of the ship’s GPS position on Google Maps and annotating the map so I could identify where my pictures were taken and suchlike.  I used it to take and organise notes at port lectures before each port of call.  And more mundane things like handing the phone to fellow passengers so they could write down their email address for me.

And all the attention the phone gets from other people. No-one bats an eyelid at an iPhone any more, but people get excited about the Note.  This ranges from waiters in the bars on board ship to security staff at airports. The final leg of my journey home was a BA flight from Heathrow to Manchester and I was using the BA Android app to display my boarding card.  This meant handing the phone to BA staff who tended to want to play and ask interested questions before handing the phone back.

The Note is a winner and deservedly so. Say nay to the nay-sayers.

Contacts, Email & Calendar

Trivial. My contacts, email, calendar are all tied to my Google ID. I use gmail and other Google services for everything. Once I have logged into Google on my new phone all these things will just be there. No help from Yoda do I need.

SMS/MMS history, call log, browser bookmarks, alarms

Do I actually need this? I have kept my texts from when I first had the phone, but rarely had occasion to look at old texts. I can think of one occasion – my son had texted me the postcode for his flat in London. I wanted to mail him something and had no other record. So there is little harm done if I start with a blank SMS history but as an experiment I am going to try to transition it to the Note.  I’m using  myBackup Pro to back up various items to the cloud: Call Log, Bookmarks, SMS, MMS, Alarms.  I will attempt to restore these into the Note.  Could be interesting. The bookmarks won’t be complete as I have taken to using the Dolphin browser which has a separate bookmark system.

Done it. Backup uploaded.  The app helpfully has a facility so you can email yourself the access details for later retrieval of the backup from the cloud.

Apps

Also easy. I installed AppBrain and used it to create an on-line record of all my apps. I should be able to rely on the Android Market to recover all my paid apps but possibly it won’t have the free apps.  I currently have around 80 apps in total, most of them free ones. That’s where AppBrain comes in; I should be able to install them one by one from there. Time to do an AppBrain sync.  Done.

I installed Google Currents from the apk as it has not officially been released in the UK.  I still have the file as an email attachment.  It is out of date now but still works.  That one will have to be done manually.

Photos and other media

I’m just going to copy the entire accessible file system, both on-board and on micro SD card, to my PC.  I can copy as many of my media files as I want on to the new phone. Quite a lot of music.  Some photos. I will in any event take the opportunity to back my photos up the the cloud.

Tasker

I use the Tasker app to customise the behaviour of my phone. This includes handy buttons to turn brightness up to max (handy if you are out in the street and can’t see your screen), auto switching of wifi on and off depending on whether I am at home, switching off notification sounds at night time, etc.

In practice the most reliable way is to have Tasker email the XML for each behaviour profile to my gmail. I can load the profiles back into Tasker later in the new phone.  Done.

Just realised that this approach does not save the individual task definitions that are used to power the icons for max brightness, silent, quiet, SMS reader on etc.  So I have turned on Tasker’s autobackup to create a file with the complete user data in XML.  This gets copied to the PC with the other files and will be available for restore in the Note.

GO Launcher Ex

Nearly forgot! I have a lot of customisation built into my launcher settings. But there is a backup option.  I have just run the backup and the file will be copied to my PC with all the other files.

I think I am good to go when the new phone shows up.

But I have started to come to the view that there is a truly great option available right now, the Samsung Galaxy Note. When it was first announced I dismissed it as a curiosity, an oddball device for a very niche market. Somewhere between smartphone and tablet and with, of all things, a built-in stylus reminiscent of my Windows Mobile devices of old.

I may have been too hasty. The Note is creating quite a buzz. People who actually spend any time with it seem to fall in love.  It is not the stylus (sorry, S Pen) that is of particular interest, thought it might be useful for occasional quick note taking.  It seems to be the fabulous screen, just big enough to make browsing, watching video and reading e-books a delight, while still just portable enough to carry everywhere as your day to day phone and music player.  And the performance is streets ahead of anything else on the market, all with quite passable battery life thanks to the souped up 2500 mAh battery.

The fundamental question is around the form factor. Is it the best of all worlds, combining the benefits of a smartphone and tablet in a single device? Or might the opposite be true, that it is too big for sensible use as a phone while still being too small to serve properly as a tablet? The reviews from the Verges, Engadgets and TechRadars of this world all fail to give the Note a ringing endorsement. They are charmed by the screen and the performance but all feel the device is too big to fit in your jeans pocket so not really suited as a regular day to day phone.

If, though, you read the user comments on those reviews you get a different picture. People who have bought the phone seem to get used to the size quite quickly and they all think it is great. No-one appears to regret buying it.  It is bigger than typical smartphones but not too big to carry in a trouser or jacket pocket. For women it is even easier as it will fit in their purse, indeed Samsung have been quoted as suggesting they planned to market the Note primarily to women in the UK because of the purse compatibility.  Not that this will stop many men being just as keen on the Note.

My current phone contract is up on Tuesday and there is no longer any doubt in my mind. I won’t be waiting for the Galaxy SIII when I can have a Note right away.

Strikes me though there is another option coming up on the rails from a slightly different direction. DoubleTwist, which has for ages been the default choice for music playback on Android, is starting to flesh out its podcast credentials and pushing very hard to get into that niche. No doubt it sees an opportunity to win afficionados already using DT extensively for music playback.  Certainly there are attractions in having a single app to cover both music and podcasts, as with say iTunes in the Apple world.

Users of DT for music would once have had to get music onto their Android phones by syncing with their computer, using a USB cable.  Then DT introduced AirSync at extra cost which allows the same thing to be done wirelessly over the domestic wifi.  DT are now trying to peddle this wireless syncing as a key feature for podcast consumers, as if DoggCatcher and all the other established podcatchers had not been offering wireless podcast downloads from day one.

So is DT any good for podcasts? The short answer so far is “no”. Adding podcast feeds is a failure, on my phone at least. There appears to be only the choice of adding from a set list under each of a number of categories, and a “search” feature. I couldn’t get the latter to work – as I type in search terms the search symbol disappears and there seems no way to actually invoke a search. Nor is there any way to add an RSS feed directly from the URL, so far as I can see.

The other killer is that there is no option for variable podcasts playback speed. I would never get through my podcasts of a week if I could not listen at say 1.5x speed.

DT seems to be a long way from being a viable podcatcher right now. They would do better to fill in the gaps in their feature list before starting to push it. For myself I will continue to use DoggCatcher which is now the complete, almost faultless podcatcher.

Can it really only be 16 and a half months ago that I was still using a Windows Mobile phone? Yes, I mean clunky old Windows Mobile that needed a stylus, not the new Windows Phone with its Metro interface.  I can barely remember my old HTC XDA Stellar (Tytn II).  I’m sure it’s still lying around somewhere.

My current phone is a Samsung Galaxy S, running Gingerbread 2.3.3, and I’m pretty certain my next phone will be another Android device. Well I can’t see myself buying an iPhone.  I still feel as I did 16 months ago. I think the iPhone is a stunning piece of engineering, design and software+hardware integration. But it’s a bit small screen-wise, inflexible in terms of UI and lacks other features I value such as tethering and turn-by-turn Google navigation. The worst aspect of the locked-down UI is that sliding finger keyboards (as typified by “Swype“) are not permitted on iPhones.

Don’t I need Siri? After the novelty wore off I might use it on occasion when I remembered it was there.  I’ve had a play with Siri on my kids’ iPhones. It is better than anything currently on Android (closest to date is Speaktoit Assistant) but that won’t last long.

What about Windows Phone? I actually think these are fantastic phones. They are refreshingly different and have if anything gone beyond iPhone and Android by looking for a new paradigm to supersede the grid of icons. The idea of “hubs” to integrate contacts/social networking/other services does offer something new and potentially superior. I do love the look and design of the high end Nokia Lumia phones. I steered clear of Windows Phone 16 months ago because the platform was just launching and I expected teething problems. I had no wish to be an early adopter and hindsight confirms I was right to be cautious.  But what about now that Windows Phone is past the early creakiness?

No. I really want Windows Phone to muscle its way into the market and be a major player, but I don’t actually want a Windows Phone for myself right now. I feel it is a phone that will work best for people who live on social networks, who will make the most of the integrated  hub concept.  I don’t use Facebook, don’t hang on every tweet, don’t have an Xbox, don’t use Microsoft services such as Live, Skydrive and hotmail.

I’m primarily a Google services user. I want gmail, Google calendars, Google maps and turn-by-turn navigation. I use Google+ but not on my phone. And I like to tinker with my user interface. Get it all organised exactly the way I want it.  I want to use an app like Tasker to fine-tune the phone’s behaviour. I want the Swype keyboard, which knocks all others into a cocked hat. And all of that points back to Android.

My initial temptation was to go for the Galaxy Nexus. I hate manufacturers’ insistence on trying to differentiate themselves by adding skins to the OS. Ice Cream Sandwich does not need “improving” and certainly not at the cost of being beholden to manufacturers and carriers for months while they add their skins and bloatware to new releases of Android.  The Galaxy Nexus would cut through all that, and is a fine device. But Leo Laporte put me off it a bit on “Before You Buy”. Mostly because of his rant over the pentile screen although no-one else seems to have a problem with it. I have a pentile screen on my Galaxy S and it doesn’t bother me.  Leo also objected to the soft buttons replacing traditional capacitive hardware buttons.  I actually think that is key to the concept of ICS unifying tablets/phones and may only work clunkily now because many apps have yet to be optimised for the new OS.  Still, his hostility gave me pause.

My carrier, T-Mobile, don’t offer the Galaxy Nexus in the UK. I won’t switch carrier, no-one else matches the signal strength where I live. There are third party vendors offering the Galaxy Nexus on T-Mobile contracts but I’m not loving the packages on offer.

My best hope is the Samsung Galaxy S III but that may not be out till the summer.

You know what? I’m going to stick with my Galaxy S for now, and switch to a SIM-only 30-day rolling T-Mobile contract.  I can keep my physical SIM and number and cut my monthly outlay to £15 per month. When someone finally brings out a new ICS phone worth having, that’s available on T-Mobile, I’ll take out a new 18 month contract.

There are other options. BeyondPod has its devotees but I could not get to grips with it at all. ACast served me well for a while but has now fallen by the wayside.  Google’s Listen is not a serious contender for podcast addicts.

Doggcatcher is clearly a stable, mature product and my podcatcher of choice for the last year or so, but I have on more than one occasion been tempted to give Pocket Casts an extended try-out. Currently I am back to DoggCatcher but until recently was using both: Pocket Casts for audio podcasts and DoggCatcher for video podcasts. It may seem like an odd thing to do but there are reasons for it, as will become clear soon.

I have already commented on the choice between these two podcatcher options, but now would seem as good a time as any to take stock of where they are up to and go into the relative pros and cons in a bit more depth.

DoggCatcher

Summary: Close to faultless. Very stable, force-closes are few and far between.  It does trip up very occasionally but mainly on BBC podcasts – for some reason BBC podcasts are surprisingly troublesome even on simple playback. DC’s visual design is fine, if not very distinctive. Don’t much like the logo. Overall, though, a sound, mature product and definitely the default choice.

Advantages:

• Stable, lean, reliable, force-closes are rare
• Good podcast search options when adding feeds
• Audio and video automatically added to separate playlists
• Option to play video podcasts in the external video player app of your choice
• Variable playback speed, but you need to install the Presto app at extra cost
• Virtual feed option (so you can add media files for playback manually rather than via an RSS feed)

Disadvantages:

• Annoying bug when used with stereo bluetooth earphones or other such devices. Unpredictably can be unresponsive to the skip 60 seconds forward button (on the bluetooth device) and repeated attempts to skip can result in skipping to start of next podcast in the playlist, the current one being flagged as “done” and removed from the playlist.  Infuriating if you are listening in the car or otherwise not in a position to fiddle around with your phone to resurrect the podcast you were in the middle of
• Rather conventional, dated design

Pocket Casts

Summary: A podcatcher with attitude. The ‘strines behind Shifty Jelly are colourful outgoing individuals, and their personality has pervaded their product. Staid it is not – the looks are modern and brash but stylish at the same time. Then again looks aren’t everything and PC still has plenty of iterations to go before it performs as smoothly and seamlessly as DC.

Advantages:

• Attractive modern look and feel – very fresh
• Very fast check for feed updates (because check is carried out on server not by app in phone)
• Perfectly adequate podcast search options when adding feeds
• Variable playback speed, but you need to install the Presto app at extra cost

Disadvantages:

• Seems to hog more and more of the phone’s resources with continued use, with a corresponding tendency towards ever more frequent force-closes. With heavy use, can cause your phone to crash more often than you’d like (maybe less of a problem if you have a recent high-spec device).  Is getting better, with upgrades, but still a fair way behind DC
• Breaks a number of implicit Android UI design conventions. Settings are selected only through the menu built in to the app’s UI, not accessed through the hardware menu button. Behaviour of back button counter-intuitive – typically exits app rather than returning you to previous screen
• Episodes which could not be downloaded at the first opportunity (because, say, app was set for wifi download only and at the time no wifi was available) do not then automatically download once the phone reconnects to the wifi. The user has to instigate these downloads manually
• Single playlist for audio and video – very inconvenient if you are on a long car journey and only want audio podcasts, saving video for when you can watch it rather than just hear the audio
• No virtual feed option

So why was I using PC for audio and DC for video for a while? I mainly listen to podcasts over bluetooth stereo and DC’s podcast-skipping bug mentioned above was starting to drive me nuts. PC does not suffer from the same problem so I switched but then found I was getting my video podcasts mixed in with the audio ones. So using PC for audio podcasts only and DC for video only looked like the best of both worlds, particularly since DC allows me to use the excellent MX Video Player for playback. In the end though the force-closes and crashes with PC were too much and I am back to DC for everything.

As the proud owner of a Galaxy S, I find myself asking: am I bovvered? Do I feel slighted by Samsung for their failure to include my phone in their update plans?

Maybe I might if I had bought my phone on a 2 year contract.  I picked mine up in September 2010 on an 18 month contract and am advised I can claim an upgrade from the middle of February. So I think I can wait. The phone works fine and I doubt there will be that much in ICS that will revolutionise my use of it.  I’m more interested in upgrading the hardware than the software, and have my eye very firmly on a Galaxy Nexus.  Bigger, higher resolution screen, more powerful processor, more RAM. No carrier bloatware and no waiting on carriers for upgrades. Goodbye to Samsung KIES.

I will keep my Galaxy S to try out rooting and switching ROMs.  I have never dared mess about with my main day to day phone for fear of bricking it.  I need it to work and cannot take a chance on ruining it while voiding my warranty.  Once it is a spare phone, I can use it to experiment on with very little to lose.

There was though one infuriating bug, affecting playback via stereo bluetooth. I nearly always listen to podcasts over A2DP, whether in the street with my bluetooth headset or in the car. I have my Android phone set up so that the forward/back buttons skip ahead 60 seconds or rewind 30 seconds respectively, very handy for fast forwarding past adverts and occasional uninteresting content. The skipping/rewinding always worked flawlessly if I was using the DoggCatcher interface on the Android handset itself, but not so if using the physical buttons on the bluetooth headset or in the car (my Lexus has the audio controls on the steering wheel). The skip forward in particular was very laggy, either failing to work at all or doing so after a long delay. Worse than that, a second attempt to skip forward had the infuriating tendency to jump directly to the start of the next podcast on the playlist, meanwhile deleting the one I had been listening to.

This became so irritating that I tried a newer podcast app, Pocket Casts. I have to say that I initially liked Pocket Casts a lot. I liked the colour scheme and the modern, slick look of the interface. I loved the fact that the response to forward/rewind button clicks over bluetooth was instant and never abandoned a podcast in mid-stream. Against that, it was very fussy about podcast downloads. The feed update cycle was lightning fast, because it happens on the vendor’s server, but if no wifi was available the downloads themselves would be flagged as failed.  That is fair enough to the extent I had specified download over wifi only, but I expect the podcast app to complete the downloads automatically once I am back in a wifi zone. Pocket Casts requires you to restart such downloads manually. And the force closes on playback started to get out of hand.

In the end I went back to DoggCatcher and was just careful with skipping forward when on bluetooth. That is, until I contacted the DoggCatcher developer and pointed out the problem, citing Pocket Casts as an app which gets that bit of functionality right, even if other problems let it down.  To his credit, the developer has taken note and addressed the problem.  As of the latest version, numbered 1.2.2919, the bluetooth bug has gone away. DoggCatcher now reigns supreme.

The number one Android podcast app appears to be DoggCatcher, but it wasn’t free to try so I picked on another reasonably popular choice, ACast, just to get started.  ACast is ad supported and therefore free. It worked fine so I stuck with it. After a while I paid for the companion ”unlock key” app that switches off the ads.

ACast served me well for months but ultimately it all went a bit wrong and had to go.  It is all to do with variable listening speed and it may have been my own intervention that helped set ACast on a downward path. I tend to listen to podcasts at 1.5 x the normal speed, just to get through them all in the available time.  If you have an iPhone there is a native option to vary the playback speed, but there is no built-in equivalent in Android.  I got by for a while using the web-based Podshifter service which creates new RSS feeds delivering sped-up versions of all your favourite podcasts, but Podshifter has its own downsides including, at times, a long wait for the Podshifter servers to process the podcasts you are waiting to listen to.  

I asked the ACast developer if he would consider adding a variable speed playback feature.  Somewhat to my surprise he did just that, bless him. Maybe he was getting a lot of requests along those lines.  Variable speed playback was added as an “experimental” feature.  At first it was prone to jitters but he kept releasing updates and it became quite stable.  But other bugs began to creep in. ACast developed some annoying habits. If you tried to advance to next podcast it would sometimes go to the end of the current podcast but not advance the “now playing” cursor.  Worse than that, it became prone, when coming to the end of one podcast and starting the next, to grind to an inexplicable stop.  Often it would run out of memory and crash, needing an app restart before being able to resume playback.  

These niggles were getting worse.  I was deleting every other app I thought might be starving ACast of memory space.  The developer seemed to disappear.  No more updates or attempts to fix the problems.  Maybe he wasn’t making enough out of it and gave the whole thing up as a bad job. Who knows? In the end with regret I cast away ACast and went with the crowd, purchasing DoggCatcher.

The latter now also supports variable speed playback but requires you to purchase the separate Presto app at extra cost. Still, I was out of options and the costs are hardly prohibitive.  I now wish I had bought DoggCatcher on day one.  It is the top podcast app for a reason.

It is simpler to use than ACast.  It took a while to get used to the different UI paradigm but I’ve got it working the way I want it.  It doesn’t seem quite as robust as Acast when it comes to waking up every X hours (or whatever interval you set) and checking for and downloading new podcasts. ACast was rock solid in that regard at least and DoggCatcher occasionally seems to be playing catch-up. But the sound quality with speeded up podcasts is far superior.  I had not appreciated how much the ACast variable speed feature was impairing the sound quality until I switched to DC.  Presto does a far better job – hardly any change in quality, just faster, and no jitters or jumps. And DC does not get stuck on one podcast or stop unexpectedly.  It is less memory hungry – no crashes.

But the most amazing thing is the reduced battery consumption!  Before I upgraded to Gingerbread (Android 2.3) around a month or so ago there was no chance of getting through the day without a battery boost on the mains or via USB cable from my PC.  The upgrade from Froyo to Gingerbread made a quite noticeable difference – I could get through the day without charging maybe 2 days out of every 5. Since ditching ACast in favour of DC my phone nearly always lasts the day, often quite comfortably.  And I am not using it any less.  The only conclusion I can draw is that ACast is an absolute battery hog.