Three UK's Mobilcast is a piece of GENIUS

Mobilcast is Three UK’s podcast-to-your-mobile service and is part of their X-Series offering. I’m extremely impressed. Mega impressed. You’ll note that this doesn’t happen often.

Generally speaking, I’m left dumbstruck at some silly strategy or the like (Vodafone’s me-too on broadband, Orange’s unlimited data, but only at 2am on a third Tuesday of each month, and so on) so it’s a genuine pleasure to check out a feature that is every bit as good as you thought it might be.

That’s the Mobilcast icon there top centre of the X-Series screen. If you’ve added X-Series to your N73, you just need to download the software and get going. Find it via it’s icon in your menu tree to run it.

Mobilcast — provided, I gather, by the chaps at Melodeo, enables you to browse, subscribe, download and play podcasts.

Tip top absolutely fuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh k i n g excellent (an authentic description, I think).

Mobilcast on Three is an example of a mobile operator working at it’s best. You’ve bought X-Series. You’ve got more or less unlimited data. You’re basically not having to worry about downloads. So now you want to actually try some entertainment out? You want to actually flex the muscles of the N73 and you’re open internet pipe and start consuming some mobile media!

Good: If, like me, you’re a big fan of podcasts, I’m pretty sure you’ll love, if not deeply respect Mobilcast. I regularly get a ton of BBC podcasts. I rarely listen to the radio in real time. I’ve too much to do! So, for example, I thoroughly enjoy Mark Kermode’s film reviews every week with Simon Radio on Radio 5 Live.

When I’m heading off to the cinema, I usually stick on the iPod in the car and listen to Mark telling me just how bad the film I’ve opted to go and see is. 😉

I did a rather ambitious test of Mobilcast. I didn’t think it would perform as expected. More on this below.

Now, how’s it work?

First off, click the icon to open Mobilcast. The first screen you get is this one:

Yes, I do want to refresh. This refreshes the list of podcasts — pretty comprehensive — managed (again, I think) by Melodeo.

There’s a rather intuitive exploring interface. You arrive at ‘home’ and then use the cursor keys to flick down the various content menus (‘entertainment’, ‘business’ and so on).

I clicked in and found Scott Mills Daily — another good BBC podcast:

As you can see above, you’re given a list of recent available podcasts. You can request more — and you can add it to your favourites too.

Like the sound of the Pulling Tips podcast? Simple. Press the central ‘enter’ key and you’re presented with this screen:

There are the details. 1.2 meg download. You can ‘Listen Now’ — which streams the audio to you right away, or you can ‘Save For Later’ which downloads the audio file and saves it on your device.

So, let’s click on Listen Now;

The Mobilcast application pops up — that’s it above. It’s perhaps not the sexiest looking thing in the context of some of the fancy X-Series device graphics, but it works fine. You can easily control the volume, skip, repeat, pause and so on.

There’s a ton of different podcasts in the menu system for you to listen to. You’re guaranteed, I’m sure, to find something that interests you. There’s quite an array of BBC podcasts featured:

However, the list is perhaps not as comprehensive as some uber geeks would like. I couldn’t find the Prime Minister’s Questions podcast by the Guardian, for example. (I did a search on Mobilcast for it)

That said, it’s a terrific example of consumer-friendly podcasts that, I reckon, if I put in front of your standard X-Series user, would be very well received. There’s of course a heck of lot of scope to increase the directory as required.