Click on a podcast and you'll get a list of the last two or three episodes. Click on the episode and you'll be able to play the podcast, save it to your phone's ringtones folder (more on that oddity later), or add it to your favorites list. The player lets you pause, fast-forward, and rewind through streaming podcasts, but not step through iTunes-style chapters.

Melodeo has a Web site, too, with a much broader selection of podcasts. Supposedly, you can add podcasts not in Mobilcast's menus to your My Favorites folder by using either a Search command on your phone (which searches a broader database) or a "Link to Web" that connects your phone's favorites list to the favorites you select on the company's Web site.

I found Mobilcast's search to be inadequate, however, turning up only two of my six favorite podcasts. When I set up Web favorites for PC Mag Radio, Gearlog Radio, CBC Radio 3 music, NYUB music, Frommer's Travel Guides, and Engadget Mobile, only the Frommer's podcast showed up in the phone's default menus, and Engadget came up on the broader phone search. When I tried Link to Web, the other podcasts didn't appear on my phone. Melodeo said this is a bug in the Link to Web function and that it's being fixed.

The PC Mag and Gearlog podcasts also didn't show up on Melodeo's Web site initially, but after I submitted them through a link on the site, they appeared within 48 hours. Even so, I couldn't get them onto the phone.

Mobile podcasts play and download in an 8-KHz AMR 3GP format. That's fine for speech, but music sounds as if it's coming from the end of a long cardboard tube—to put it kindly. Still, this highly compressed format works with even the slowest data networks; I had no trouble streaming podcasts over the poky GPRS modem on a Cingular Motorola SLVR L7. That's a big plus.

Getting Mobilcast onto the L7, on the other hand, was a little painful. Melodeo, Cingular, and Alltel have approved only a short list of phones for Mobilcast. I tried the application on the Motorola SLVR L7, a Samsung T519 for T-Mobile , and a Motorola V3i for Cingular. The V3i, the only phone of the bunch officially on Mobilcast's approved list, refused to authenticate and run the application, even though I bought it from Cingular's Media Mall. The T519 also refused to run the application. The L7 ran Mobilcast downloaded directly from Melodeo's Web site, but only after I tweaked the application's permissions with a hacker tool. The Sprint phone also ran Mobilcast fine, but, oddly, would play podcasts only through the earpiece or a wired headset, not through the speakerphone. Mobilcast doesn't support Bluetooth stereo audio, either.

Saving the podcasts for future use is a strange experience. Podcasts typically save into a phone's "ringtones" folder, which Melodeo says is a limitation on the Java stacks included on many phones. That means you can't play or queue up your podcasts through the phone's MP3 player, or, in many cases, transfer them to memory cards to free up storage. (On the other hand, you can assign a podcast as a ringtone, weird as that may seem.) Melodeo said Symbian Series 60 phones such as the Nokia 6682 let you save podcasts anywhere you like.

If you're going to use Mobilcast, make sure you have an unlimited data plan, as the application can download quite a lot of data. Sprint's is $15 per month; Cingular's, $19.99; and T-Mobile's, $29.99 (including access to Wi-Fi hot spots).

Mobilcast is a terrific idea and a great start. Podcasts provide hands-free entertainment on the go, the client works with even the slowest phones, and mobile carriers should be thrilled, because this gives users a compelling reason to buy data plans. But because podcasts (and cell phones) are a very personal experience, Melodeo needs to make sure that the whole world of podcasting is available to listeners, not just a few preselected choices.