Dave Burrows – Tech / iPhone Blog – Technical Evangelist

I’ve been having problems for months, many many months with podcasts on the iPhone and I finally figured out what is wrong with downloading of Podcasts through iTunes.

I use iTunes to subscribe to podcasts and download the latest episodes because it’s SUPPOSED to also mark as read the podcasts once you’ve listened to them on the iPhone (which it does) then remove them from your iPhone when you sync to iTunes (which it doesn’t) and most of the time I find it then shows them as not listened to once I’ve re-synced my iPhone.

This is really infuriating because I have a lot of podcasts, and I don’t remember which ones I’ve listened to. I started to delete them after listening to them to only find iTunes re-instate them again on the iPhone.

I watched with great intent after listening to several podcasts last night and syncing my iPhone this morning that with iTunes open on Windows Vista, connecting the iPhone to the sync cradle, immediately the iPhone says it’s Syncing the iPhone (which it’s not). I have manual sync setup on iTunes so I have to click the SYNC button manually for the iPhone to actually sync. I waited 30 seconds and the Sync message disappeared on the iPhone, at this point I decided to go back into iPod player and look at the last two podcasts I had listened to. Previously these were marked as listened to, now they have the blue dot next to them to say I haven’t listened to them….UGH!

Why is the iPhone doing this very quick sync and allowing iTunes on the PC to overwrite your listened too settings on the iPhone ? Essentially doing a one-way sync before you actually sync the iPhone rather than a proper two-way sync.

Now I know what the problem is, I seriously have to decide whether to continue using iTunes for podcasts. I use it mainly because I want to listen to podcasts when I’m driving or doing other things on the iPhone and with the lack of proper multi-tasking on the iPhone, I’m left with very little choice. Hopefully this will change more when using iPhone OS 4 but time will tell…..