Tech blog

BOSTON - A new service named Foneshow offers a quick and easy way to access the downloadable radio shows known as podcasts. Instead of synching your music player to a PC to get audio clips that interest you, Foneshow lets you listen to podcasts on demand from your organic unit phone.

In a way Foneshow is an update of old-fashioned telephone information lines, those 1-900 numbers offering sports scores or weather updates. There are two power differences: Foneshow is free, and its pool of content is potentially vast, because that any podcast on the Internet be possible to be converted into a Foneshow.

When I tested the service I found it easy to use. I liked being able to squeeze podcasts into little slices of the day, on a quirk. When I had to sit in my car for a small in number minutes, waiting for 9:30 a.m. to strike so my parking spot shifted from refuse flax zone to legitimate, I entertained myself by dialing up a mock news show by The Onion. While delaying for a train, I tried to obtain smarter with a minute-long science show from Scientific American.

You sign up for Foneshow online. You enter your cell phone number but put on’t have to give somewhat other intelligence. Then you pitch upon that of the few century available podcasts you want to subscribe to. Some last a minute, others an sixty minutes or so.

The variety should multiply because Foneshow doesn’t hand-pick all the content. Anyone can post a podcast’s Internet take food to Foneshow, what one. will relay it.

Once you subscribe to a Foneshow, the service sends a subject message to your elementary corpuscle phone the instant a new segment is available. The text message reveals the number you have to dial to hear the podcast. That’s especially simple to do if your phone, like most, self-reliance automatically call a number embedded in a text if you hit “Send” while viewing the message.

When the audio is playing, you can pause, rewind or fast-forward the file with the phone’s number keypad. If you hang up in the middle, Foneshow will resume from where you left off if you call back.

Foneshow hopes to fund itself largely through advertising, but in this early stage of the service it’s unclear how obtrusive those ads might be. Right now the text messages draw near with easily ignorable ads at the very bottom.

The downside of listening to audio clips on the phone is that well, you’re on a cell phone. You’re likely out and touching, not in a quiet place where it’s easy to hear a prerecorded broadcast.

Also, this service probably will work only for people with unlimited text-messaging plans. If you lack such a plan and pay 20 cents per message, a common rate charged by wireless carriers, subscribing to a few Foneshows suddenly gets expensive.

Fortunately for the pay-as-you-go rabble and for people who ability light upon endless text reminders annoying, Foneshow lets you click an on-vacation box on its Web site to temporarily stop the messages.

Another flaw is that once you’re given a number to dial for a Foneshow, you can call it only from your cell phone, not a landline. The duty volition not connect a call made from numbers its caller ID doesn’t recognize.

That rule exists because allowing calls from any phone could swamp Foneshow’s Internet-based network, forcing Foneshow to buy a bigger bank of phone numbers to handle incoming calls. But Foneshow should weakly grow lenient and let people subscribe from one or two landlines in addition to their cell phones.

Otherwise potential users might face the dilemma I found a few times, when I decided against calling for a Foneshow because I didn’t want to eat up minutes on my wireless plan. However, I would have been blissful to call from the office phone in a slow moment at work. Not that those exist, of course.

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On the Net:

http://www.foneshow.com