are there any phones that play video podcasts?
The Palm Treo 755p includes an embedded video player that will let you play MPEG 4 videos (the format of most video podcasts) directly from the Internet by clicking on the links online. It also can play some of those directly from your miniSD card. It’s available for Verizon; if you can switch carriers, the Palm Centro has all the same features on Sprint, but in a smaller, less expensive form factor and with cheaper data plans. You can upgrade that to a commercial application called Kinoma Player that goes further, adding a whole catalog of video for playback online that’s updated frequenly, including many podcast feeds directly. It also supports more formats. The website TreoCentral wrote a very long and involved review of Kinoma Player that tells a lot about its capabilities. I’ve got a 755p on Sprint, and I use the video playback feature several times a week.
