A piece of e-mail crossed my in-box this morning. The message announced an upgrade to my Palm OS-based RSS news reader, Hand RSS. The upgrade is significant enough to warrant a renaming of the software to Quick News, which Standalone, the company that distributes it, describes this way:

Quick News for Palm OS allows you to download these news feeds either via a HotSync, or using a direct internet connection on your Palm Powered Handheld and read them later! Use it to keep updated with the latest news, sports and financial updates as well as read your favorite websites!

What caught my eye, though, was this two-word line in the list of features: “Podcast support.” (“Improved OPML import support” was also an attention-getter.)

I found a review of the product on a blog called Zen Garden that offered this comment on the app’s podcast-retrieving capability:

So what made this to be the killer app? If you happen to know, podcasts are merely RSS feeds with audio content. When using Quick News, you’ll be getting the whole bunch of news feeds from your particular podcast channel (then you could freely choose which podcast content to download). You can now treat podcasts like any other news feeds that you download and read (or should I say listen) anytime. Isn’t that sweet?

Indeed it is, assuming there’s room on the Treo’s anemic buit-in storage to handle a 20- or 30 MB podcast. Of course, I’m guessing you can also save the files to a flash card, which would solve that problem. There’s also the issue of the painfully slow speeds for downloading using the Sprint PCS network. It’ll be much faster using a hot synch while connected to the Net with my broadband service—but at that point, I might as well just get the podcasts over the computer and transfer them to my iPod.

Nevertheless, it’s a great idea and since the upgrade is free, I’ll be giving it a try.