I'm probably late to the party, but I very rarely bother to update the firmware on my iPod. I'd heard the new iPod Updater (2005-06-26) contains support for podcasts but had not seen any details anywhere. I can confirm it is worth the effort if you listen to podcasts on your iPod.
The podcast support includes:-
- Viewing of shownotes (press select 3 times)
- Automatic bookmarking (remembers where you were if you play another song and come back)
- Enhanced display of "Extended podcasts" - the bookmarks show up within the progress bar and you can skip to the next bookmark - very handy for skipping that song or promo that doesn't interest you.
- Scrolling of show descriptions in the menu
- Display of date of podcast in the menu
Some downsides of Podcast support:-
- Cannot find a way to play all the episodes of one podcast, after finishing one it goes back to the main menu
- New podcasts do not show up in smart playlists. I had a playlist set up which was "Not Listened to in Last Week" which was very useful in automatically showing me what had been downloaded but not listened to yet. Would be good if they just included the feature within podcast support in iTunes to just update songs that had not been listened to yet (tracked by iTunes anyway)
This is all from my little iPod mini, I dare say support on the iPod photo includes all the artwork stuff that you get to see in extended podcast in iTunes..
Anyway, despite the downsides (which are annoying) the update is pretty sweet. You also have to update to iTunes 4.9 to take advantage of the podcast features.
