Download Squad

The first time you start the application it pops up with a confirmation screen telling you that no podcasts as available, and that you can use the desktop to transfer them or add a rss feed using the menus. After confirming that alert you are taken to the downloaded Podcasts screen which is of course empty. I think it should have taken me right to the feeds screen to add a feed. From the menu here you can exit the application, go to the feeds screen or refresh.

I went to the feeds screen to add a feed or two to use as tests. The feeds screen has soft buttons for download and menu, and in the menu is the option used to add feeds. The add feed screen is basic and has a single text box that is used to enter the feed URL. After adding two feeds I found the first issue with the application on my Motorola Q. This was because I had my options set for a different color scheme that made the row selected in the list have a black background and the text did not change color so the text was black on black background so I could not see anything for the feed I was on. After a quick change on the color scheme for my phone, it looked fine.

After this I got a little confused with using the application, since it is still in beta there is not a lot of instructions that came with it, and I was unsure what to do. I choose the download option for the feeds and it downloaded podcasts and showed me an alert screen. After I responded to that alert, I was at the download progress screen with the only option I saw was Cancel, but since the download was done that did nothing. Finally I remembered the back button and that took me back to the feeds screen. From the menu there I selected "Downloads" thinking that would take me to the Downloaded Podcasts screen to play one of the files. Unfortunately that would take you back to the ACTIVE downloads screen, but since I had no downloads going it just put up an alert saying "No Active Downloads" and went back to the feeds screen. Again the "back" button is the option that takes you to the Downloaded Podcasts screen. This was not intuitive to me off hand as I did not consider it going "back" to go to the downloaded screen, but once i got past that hurdle in MY THINKING I continued playing with testing the application.

From the Downloaded Podcasts screen you can select a podcast and view the details for it using the left soft key. That option shows you the show notes for the item, and offers you options on the soft buttons for Play and Delete. Those are pretty self explaining and do what you would think they would.

So after this testing of the application what are my thought on it? It is stable and the errors that did come up when a feed was bad or I ran out of space to save the downloads, didn't crash the application or the phone in any way, which is always good. The interface is fairly simple and streamlined, and althought I had some issues with flow of the screens once I got over MY hurdle, the interface was clean, quick and easy to use.
I think I will be looking at continuing with this application on the phone for a while, and will try keeping an eye out for new versions being released.