The Kodak Theatre HD Player’s motion-sensing pointer remote works much like a mouse on a TV screen.

This week I tested the Kodak Theatre HD Player, the photo-centric company’s attempt to snag valuable real estate in the living room. This small, black box pulls photos and videos from computers around the house and displays them on an HDTV. It also enables the sending and receiving of photos via Kodak Gallery, and connects to Web-based photos stored on Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, .Mac and others. Podcasts, Internet Radio and updates from news feeds, weather forecasts and stock quotes are also accessible using the HD Player. And it has a terrifically simple motion-sensing remote that works like using a mouse on a TV screen.

But the HD Player isn’t all smiles. Its $299 price doesn’t include any built-in storage for keeping content directly on the device. It currently has no way of accessing HD movies or television shows, nor will it work with Macs. In comparison, Apple’s (AAPL) $229 Apple TV has 40 gigabytes of storage, can access HD television shows and movies via the iTunes Store, and works with Macs and Windows PCs. This is important because as budgets tighten in the current economy, gadgets have to prove their value and versatility more than ever.

After using the Kodak Theatre HD Player with Windows XP and Vista machines over the past week, I can conclude that this device’s interface shines in its simplicity and is a lot of fun to use. Kodak teamed with Hillcrest Labs to make the player’s motion-sensitive remote and corresponding software, which includes satisfying extra features like images that automatically magnify when the remote control’s cursor points at them and icons that make chirping sounds when selected. The remote itself is shaped to rest comfortably in a hand and has three simple buttons and a scroll wheel.

Quick-access memory-card slots for six types of memory cards appear on the box’s front, and two USB ports can connect to digital cameras or USB storage devices.

Currently, the player’s software works directly with Flickr, RadioTime (8,750 radio stations) and FrameChannel, which grants access to various “channels” like Facebook, .Mac, Picasa, People.com news and National Geographic. Kodak says it will incorporate YouTube access in January; I got a sneak peek at the interface for this and it looks well-organized.

Yet the HD Player’s smart combination of software and remote left me wishing it did a bit more. Photo sharing is enabled only via Kodak Gallery, so you can’t use another Web-based account to share photos directly from your TV. Likewise, a blue light on the box slowly blinks only when new Picture Mail (a message containing shared photos) is received on a Kodak Gallery account, not when new photos are added on other sources such as Flickr Photostreams or Facebook pages.

The Home screen of the HD Player shows four categories: Pictures & Videos, Kodak Gallery, Music and Entertainment. Subcategories are where you might guess they would be, for example podcasts are listed under Entertainment. And a tiny Home icon appears in the top right corner of every screen so you can always get Home with one click. The Pictures & Videos category holds photos and videos from a currently selected Windows PC.

An unlimited number of Windows PCs can wirelessly pair with the player as long as they have special Kodak software installed on them. But only one PC’s content can be accessed at a time. I toggled between two paired computers without a problem, but would’ve preferred accessing music and photos from both sources simultaneously.

The HD Player’s motion-sensing pointer remote works much like a Wii remote control. Wherever you move it, a tiny leaf-shaped cursor appears on-screen. A Hide button on the remote will hide the cursor while you watch slideshows. The remote’s Back button is helpful; when pressed, it backs you out of one screen using visual effects that make the screen shrink into the TV as if you were moving backward.

A play button appears on the first photo in a folder so users can select this icon to quickly start slideshows. Whenever the HD Player receives new Kodak Gallery Picture Mail, or a slideshow is created on a connected PC, yellow alert circles appear on the screen to notify users and a number in the middle of these yellow circles indicates how many new items are available for viewing.

Some content on my PCs took a little while to be recognized by the HD Player, including podcasts that I subscribe to on iTunes. When they did show up, both audio and video podcasts played without issue and on-screen playback buttons made them easy to control.

The HD Player uses your photos to create automatically generated slideshows, called Picture Chronicles, once a week. These Picture Chronicles use up to 50 photos from the same time of year in all of your folders, for instance grouping all Thanksgiving photos together from the past five years.

Kodak has plans to make its player Mac-compatible in the future and also hopes to add other partnerships with new types of content following its YouTube announcement early next year.

The Kodak Theatre HD Player does its job well, bringing photos and videos that might otherwise live only on your PC to your big screen HDTV. For the holidays, this device could be a real plus. But Kodak has some work to do to make this a more useful Web-connected tool.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

• Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://walt.allthingsd.com

Notably absent from this latest firmware update: landscape SMS, MMS support and, of course, cut-and-paste–whose continued absence Apple (AAPL) apparently views as a feature.

• Enhancements to Google Maps, including support for Google Street View, plus bus schedules and walking directions
• Support for over-the-air podcast updates via the iTunes Store
• An app-scoring feature that allows users to rate applications purchased from the the App Store before deleting them
• Support for line-in audio via the iPhone’s headphone jack

Wonderful additions to the platform, all of them. Of course, there are still quite a few missing. MMS support would be nice, wouldn’t it? As would support for Flash and the ability to compose messages in landscape mode.

And what about cut-and-paste? Seriously, at this point, it’s almost like Apple (AAPL) is purposely withholding it, out of spite.

Bet you’re thinking about Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone.

I’m actually describing a Windows Mobile device. In fact, any touch-screen Windows Mobile device made in the past couple of years can perform the aforementioned functions — as long as it’s running a new application called Kinoma Play.

This much-needed shot in the arm for Windows Mobile comes from Kinoma Inc. and for $30 can be downloaded onto a computer or directly onto a device from www.kinoma.com. It works on touch and nontouch screens alike, though touch features do add a lot of pizzazz. After installation, Kinoma Play seems to totally take over the device’s multimedia functions, hiding every trace of Windows Mobile’s clunky, antiquated, menu-driven operating system.

Kinoma Play in action, clockwise from top left: a media interface, touch-screen navigation, upload to YouTube, picture rotation, search by characters, and photo zoom.

It smoothly opens and displays all types of media, including photos, videos and music. But it’s also a fast search engine for multimedia content on the phone, on the Web or even on your computer via remote search. Kinoma Play works with services including YouTube, Audible, Flickr, iDisk, Live365, Orb and SHOUTcast. And a section called the Kinoma Guide compiles over 100,000 podcast episodes, radio stations, videos, live television and Webcam clips, panoramas and photos into easy-to-browse categories.

After almost a week with this application, I changed the way I thought about on-the-go Web browsing for media. I forgot about typical browser functions like typing a Web site’s name into a URL bar and instead did plenty of things online with my portable device without deliberately thinking about being online.

Kinoma Play is so well-designed that I wish it could entirely replace the dated Windows Mobile user interface, which still lags behind the iPhone’s. But, alas, it’s about media only. It isn’t designed to supplant, and doesn’t change or improve, any of the phone’s more common functions, like overall email and Web browsing, calendar, contacts or productivity programs.

Kinoma is working on Symbian, Linux and even iPhone versions of its application and will release one of those versions by the end of this year.

I ran into a few problems while using Kinoma Play. On three different occasions using two different devices, my touch screen froze when I tried to start the application, and the only way I could fix the problem was by completely rebooting my device. Once in a while, I experienced slow performance, though this could have been attributed to my network connection. And Kinoma Play lacks a one-step shortcut to its home screen; currently, users must press a “Back” soft key on each screen until they reach the home screen.

But the pluses of Kinoma Play outweighed these hassles, especially considering how enjoyable this application was to use. I tested Kinoma on two Palm (PALM) devices running Windows Mobile: the not-yet-released Treo Pro, which will be available here in the fall for an unlocked, unsubsidized price of $549, and the $250 (after discounts and two-year-contract rebates) Treo 800w available from Sprint (S). Both have touch screens that work best with an included stylus, though a fingernail or fingertip worked for me in most cases.

Upon installation, Kinoma Play automatically scans a device’s media and organizes it into categories under a section called My Media Files. I was especially eager to see how photos were handled, so I started out in the Pictures category.

All Kinoma screens have a set of familiar navigational tools that appear as soft keys at the bottom of the screen; they show up when the bottom section of the screen is touched and disappear when touched again. On the bottom left, a “Back” arrow takes users to the previous screen. On the bottom right, a list-like icon represents what Kinoma calls the Menu Pod. When touched, this pulls up three succinct menus — for media, settings and another action related to the program that’s open.

I opened some photos that were stored on the Palm Treo Pro and touched the center of the screen with my finger. A quick tap on the screen zooms in on each photo, and a small inset of the photo with a box representing the magnified area appears on the lower right of the screen. I dragged this tiny box around in the inset image to change where I was zooming. To zoom in on a photo slowly, I simply touched and held my finger on the screen for a longer period of time. A quick tap after either zooming method will quickly snap the image back to normal view.

I moved from one photo to the next as I do on my iPod Touch: by placing a finger on one edge of the photo and flicking left or right across the screen. Rotating was fun and easy to do when I drew a circle on the photo with my fingertip in the direction that I wanted it to rotate. The image followed whatever motion I drew. To rotate the photo 180 degrees, I drew a larger half-circle.

I selected Flickr from Kinoma Play’s list of services and signed into my Flickr account in just a few steps. My photos and those of friends were just as easy to browse as my own photos, thanks to Kinoma Play’s built-in tools. The Menu Pod icon offered a one-step way to play all photos in slide shows; music could be selected to play in the background.

With a touch on the Menu Pod icon, users can add any media to favorites or to an “on-the-go” list. This same tool also sends multimedia to others via email; I used it to send friends photos of a recent trip to California as well as a YouTube link to video footage of Sen. Joe Biden speaking.

Kinoma makes something out of every action. The Menu Pod button seems to jump into the center of the screen when summoned, and each of its three menus spins like a tiny top to get out of the way so another menu can be seen. Other screens seemed to do a mini back flip as they opened or closed. And long lists seemed to bounce when scrolling reached the top or bottom.

In the Services menu, I used Audible to listen to part of an audio book and listened to rock and country songs on Web radio stations from SHOUTcast and Live365.

I particularly liked using the Kinoma Guide, which is constantly updated with material that streams to your devices when you open it. I found a Restaurant Guys podcast in which chef Cat Cora was interviewed, and even saved it for later listening by downloading this seven-megabyte podcast to my device in one clean step. Kinoma wisely adds all downloads to a special section that’s easy to find. The last 100 things you looked at on Kinoma Play can be found in a section called History.

These days in the tech world, much attention is being paid to applications sold on Apple’s App Store for use with the iPhone or iPod Touch. But Kinoma Play is one application that is desperately needed by Windows Mobile users, and it just might remind them that they can better navigate media-related Web services — without having to buy a new mobile device.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

• Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find all our columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://walt.allthingsd.com

BoomTown always has a lot to say, so getting a call from American Public Media’s Marketplace Morning radio show to pontificate on the Microsoft (MSFT)-Yahoo (YHOO)-Carl Icahn takeover drama was too tasty to pass up.

We also talked a bit about the upcoming Apple (AAPL) unveiling of its 3G iPhone.

It might become a regular visit for me, so take a listen to my chat with the sharp Renita Jablonski and let me know what you think.

Here’s the podcast:

A fondness for TiVo has encouraged users to refer to it with designated nicknames and/or genders. A teacher friend of mine was recently asked by a student if her husband’s name was TiVo after the child heard her say she would have to tell TiVo about a new TV show. But like any old friend — or spouse — who has been around for a while, TiVo has a few tricks up its sleeve that might surprise longtime users and new owners alike. This column includes just a handful of those tricks and highlights some features that may make TiVo more useful. These tips are for everyday users, not serious hackers, and many others exist.

Remote-Control Codes

Each of these codes is entered one time to enable an otherwise-hidden function, and three chimes signal the code is set. These functions can be disabled by entering the code a second time, or if TiVo is rebooted.

Clock: If you miss having a VCR nearby to tell you the time while you watch TV, TiVo can help. A digital clock can be programmed to show up in the lower right-hand corner of your television screen by pressing “SELECT-PLAY-SELECT-9-SELECT.”

While playing recorded shows, this clock displays the current time and the elapsed time of the program you’re watching. Personally, I check a show’s progress by pressing the remote’s Play button to see the progress bar, and the Info button shows the current time. But the on-screen clock might come in handy when you’re watching TV on a terrible date and you don’t want to get caught glancing at your watch.

30-second skip: One of the glorious functions of TiVo and other DVRs is their ability to fast-forward through commercials. But it takes practice to know when to press Play so as to completely miss commercials.

If you’re unsure about your fast-forwarding technique, TiVo can be permanently set to skip ahead in 30-second increments, by entering “SELECT-PLAY-SELECT-3-0-SELECT.” This code must be set while watching a recorded show. After that, the 30-second skipping works whenever you press the “Skip To Tick” button, which looks like an arrow pointing right to a straight line.

TiVo says this code won’t work for longer time increments, like 90 seconds, and I tried using various increments, to no avail. Still, pressing this button about five or seven times in a row (depending on the show) gets you through commercials with less guesswork.

Disappearing progress bar: TiVo’s progress bar, which shows how far along a program has progressed in terms of the entire show’s duration, appears at various moments, such as when you first play a recorded show or unpause. This indicator lingers on the screen for just about three seconds, but if this seems too long, you can enter “SELECT-PLAY-SELECT-PAUSE-SELECT” to set the progress bar to disappear after less than a second.

I tried this setting on my TiVo, but one second showed only a quick blink of the progress bar, not enough time to see anything.

Number Shortcuts

From the TiVo Central menu, pressing each number on the remote control’s numeric keypad skips directly to a different tool. Some of the more useful shortcuts include pressing “1″ to go to Season Pass Manager (a list of programs that are set to automatically record every episode), “4″ to go to Search Title and “8″ to go to TiVo Suggestions.

Viewing Tips

TiVo can display a programming guide in a TV-Guide-like grid, or as a two-columned TiVo Live Guide that can list future shows for hours or days out. The top of Live Guide gives a detailed description of each selected program, along with its duration and TV rating.

The Now Playing list shows content stored on a TiVo. By default, this list is organized in time sequential order with same-series TV shows grouped into folders. Remote-control shortcuts re-sort this list: pressing “1″ switches from sequential to alphabetical order and vice versa; pressing “2″ ungroups shows to display each title; shows are regrouped into folders when “2″ is pressed again.

Lesser-Known Features

Universal Swivel Search is a way of seeing how TiVo’s various shows and movies are related to one another. It lists details about each program, including actors, directors, tags associated with a show (like love, dating and addiction) and suggestions of similar content. Swivel Search is accessed through the Find Programs menu or More Options while looking at a recorded show.

By selecting a Swivel Search detail about a particular show, such as one of its actors, you can see what else he or she starred in and whether or not that show or movie is available through TiVo or Amazon.com‘s Unbox. Unbox downloads movies directly to your TiVo ranging from $2 to $15 each depending on whether you rent or buy a movie.

Plenty of free Internet content can be downloaded from the Web to your TiVo. But TiVo confusingly places this content in two menus: Find Programs and Music, Photos, Products & More. Under Find Programs, a Download TV & Movies section offers Amazon Unbox movies and free TiVoCast content. The latter can be set to automatically download with Season Pass settings, such as The Onion’s weekly video or ExerciseTV’s twice weekly videos.

The Music, Photos, Products & More menu holds content like photos and unprotected MP3s from a nearby computer, podcasts, Rhapsody music, Yahoo! Weather and Traffic and on-screen games. You can even buy movie tickets through Fandango.

TiVo takes up valuable space in a home entertainment center, so it’s important for the company to make sure its content is varied and useful. The codes and shortcuts mentioned can change the way you use this valuable device every day.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

MobiTV, from MobiTV Inc., www.mobitv.com, gives people a way to watch television on their cellphones.

For lovers of portable video, the arguments in favor of TV on phones are speed and convenience. Rather than waiting to download movies, video podcasts and TV shows to a computer and then to transfer them to a portable player like an iPod, some would rather see current, live content streamed onto the device they already carry — their cellphone — whenever they want, wherever they are.

Live TV on cellphones isn’t new. We first tested it in 2004. But it was awful then, choppy and almost unviewable, because the cellular networks were too slow and the phones were too wimpy. So I decided to try it again.

Many cellphones are capable of displaying streamed television using built-in services, but few people are aware of these capabilities and not every phone will work as well as the next. The best results are delivered on devices with good quality screens that can retrieve and display the content using high-speed networks.

I used a mobile content-streaming service called MobiTV on three phones serviced by two carriers, Sprint Nextel Corp. and AT&T Inc.’s Cingular Wireless, watching a variety of shows on screens smaller than the palm of my hand. Monthly usage for watching cellphone TV with these two carriers costs about $25 and $30, respectively, on top of your voice plan. MobiTV is compatible with more than 150 handsets, offering roughly 40 channels — about half of which show live content like that found on your home TV.

All in all, MobiTV offers a fun and simple solution for people seeking TV on the run. High-quality images appeared on screen just moments after I opened the MobiTV application and an on-screen guide labeled each channel. TLC, ESPN, The Discovery Channel, The Oxygen Network and major news channels are entertaining enough. And though my eyes hurt after 30 minutes of watching such a small screen, I only ran into a few other snafus: on-screen images disappearing while audio continued, certain channels cutting out and lips moving out of sync with audio. In more cases than not, these instances were rare or corrected themselves in seconds.

Other carriers offer video clips that might easily be confused with MobiTV Inc.’s technology. Verizon Wireless, for example, offers its V Cast service. But V Cast requires that you download clips onto your device. Sprint and Cingular also offer video-on-demand options. But the MobiTV service streams content onto your phone, showing it just about a minute later than the same content on live TV.

If you don’t use Sprint or Cingular and you’d like to download MobiTV to your standard cellphone, or to your Palm or Windows Mobile smart phone, you can do so through third-party vendors like Handango.com; these options can be found on www.mobitv.com. Vendors charge about $10 a month on top of any data charges that you might owe your carrier.

MobiTV’s service includes a channel guide.

Sprint and Cingular encourage you to buy an unlimited monthly data plan in addition to your voice plan if you’ll be watching TV on your cellphone. Sprint calls its live-TV service Sprint TV Live — though it’s really MobiTV beneath the covers — and offers TV-inclusive data plans for $15, $20 or $25. These return 8, 13 and 25 channels respectively. Sprint’s exclusive content includes the NFL network. To further confuse matters, you can also buy stand-alone Sprint TV Live on top of those three data plans; it costs about $10 monthly. Cingular charges users about $20 for its unlimited data plan plus $10 for MobiTV usage. This carrier keeps the MobiTV name.

MobiTV worked relatively the same way on all three handsets with both carriers: two Windows Mobile devices, the Sprint PPC-6700 and Cingular 8525, and a basic cellphone, Samsung Electronics Co.’s SGH-A707 with Cingular’s 3G network. In my tests, MobiTV came pre-loaded on the devices, letting me simply select it from a list to start watching streaming content.

On the Cingular 8525, a smart phone running the Windows Mobile 5.0 operating system, I browsed through a guide until I found The Oxygen Network. The Isaac Mizrahi Show, not a favorite of mine, was just ending. It was followed by a quirky game show called “Can You Tell?”

MobiTV streams two types of programs: Live and Made for Mobile. Live shows are like those on your regular TV though slightly delayed and with different commercials in the local ad slots. I watched MSNBC’s “Hardball With Chris Matthews” using MobiTV and my regular TV, and an interview with Mia Farrow started about a minute earlier on my TV than it did on my mobile device.

Made for Mobile channels include special MobiTV content, such as music-video channels, or content for certain channels that MobiTV stitches together to show in a better format for mobile. The latter is the case with ESPN; in 15 minutes, I watched clips about football, Nascar, baseball, boxing and basketball with only a few quick commercials. In these snippets, however, lips weren’t synched with the audio.

I often opted to view content in full-screen mode, which, in 10 seconds, alters the image to take over the whole screen in horizontal view. A few times, while watching full-screen view, my on-screen content froze and had to restart in the regular view.

MobiTV says that using its service to watch programs saps battery at a rate equal to that of voice calls.

People who use digital video recorders at home to pause or rewind live TV will be disappointed to find you can’t do that with MobiTV. The company is hoping to offer these capabilities in the future. But because of the smaller screen, you probably won’t want to watch your mobile screen for as long as you would a regular TV, reducing the need to pause and rewind.

MobiTV’s services will never replace your home-entertainment center experience. But the ability to watch TV on your phone is a great way to stay plugged into news and entertainment. Just be sure that you’re using a fast network and a generously sized screen.

– Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

But text blogs are yesterday’s news. The hottest new trend in personal online content creation is something called a podcast, essentially a short personal radio show or audio blog. They can be downloaded and played back on a computer or a portable music player like Apple’s iPod, whence the genre draws its name.

Podcasts range from slick productions offered by big media companies and amateur broadcasters; to clever and entertaining offerings from smart, undiscovered talent; to crude diatribes and snooze-inducing lectures by people the mainstream media proved wise not to hire. Some are just talk, some include music. Some sound like they were recorded on a 1971-vintage RadioShack cassette recorder, others — even from amateurs — are studio-quality.

These audio blogs, once the province mainly of techies, took a big step toward the mainstream last week when Apple began offering thousands of them, free, through its market-leading iTunes music store and iTunes music software. Anyone can submit a podcast for distribution through iTunes, and any iTunes user can download it. The company doesn’t charge a penny for listing or downloading podcasts.

So, this week, my assistant Katie Boehret and I set out to see how easy it is to get and create podcasts. The good news is that, with its iTunes move, Apple has made receiving podcasts as simple as downloading music. The bad news is that neither Apple nor anyone else has made it nearly as simple to create a podcast and get it online as it is to create and post a text and photo blog. Until that happens, podcasting won’t be truly mainstream.

Getting and Listening to Podcasts

Since its introduction last week, the iTunes podcast directory has become very popular, and is the easiest way to get and listen to podcasts. Apple has over 4,000 podcasts listed on iTunes today, and has been overwhelmed with new submissions. I expect that most of the podcasts on the Web will be available from Apple within a month or two.

To get podcasts from Apple, you don’t need an iPod or an Apple computer. You will, however, have to upgrade your copy of iTunes to version 4.9, and, if you plan to listen to podcasts on your iPod, you’ll need to download and install Apple’s latest iPod updater software.

To find podcasts, you merely enter the iTunes Music Store from inside the iTunes software, and go to the podcast section. There, you can search for a podcast, or browse through various categories of podcasts to find one you like.

You can either download a single instance of a podcast, or subscribe to the podcast. If you subscribe, iTunes will display new episodes of the podcast as they become available. You can unsubscribe if you tire of the material.

To get the podcasts onto your iPod, you just perform a manual or automatic synchronization, just as you do with music. In our tests, all of this worked quite well.

The only twist to the iTunes podcast experience stems from Apple’s decision to ban from its listings podcasts it deems to be pornographic, or to contain hate speech, or copyrighted material, such as music, which the podcaster lacks the right to distribute.

Apple also labels some podcasts it accepts as “Explicit,” if they contain obscenity or sexual content, but aren’t considered pornography. To enforce these rules, Apple reviews each submitted podcast. But there are flaws in that system. First of all, it delays the appearance of podcasts for as much as a week after they are submitted. Secondly, it means some podcasts won’t ever be included on iTunes, and will have to be located manually. Third, at least in its first week, Apple applied its own standards haphazardly.

In our tests, we found a number of openly pornographic podcasts that had slipped by Apple’s reviewers, and others that should have been labeled “Explicit,” but weren’t. We stumbled onto one podcast titled, “She Said, She Said” in the Talk Radio category, and found that its first entry was all about an unmentionable four-letter word. This didn’t upset us, but it might bother a parent whose child downloaded it.

And Apple reviews only the initial episode of a podcast. If the topic changes next week from M&M’s to S&M, Apple won’t know about it. We don’t care what Apple lists and doesn’t list, but, as long as it says it has rules, the company should apply them. Apple admits the errors, and says it is cleaning them up. The company also points out that it will be relying on consumers to use a feedback feature to point out problems in the future.

Creating a Podcast

There are three steps to creating a podcast. You have to record it as a sound file, usually an MP3 file. Then, you have to find some place on the Web to house, or “host” it. Finally, you have to find a way to let others know about it and make it available for easy downloading.

Unlike with text blogs, it’s hard to find a service that combines the creation, hosting and distribution steps. We found one Web site that came close — GarageBand.com, a site for unsigned musicians that includes a podcast creation “studio” anybody can use, regardless of whether they are musicians or even include music in their podcasts. More on this site later.

To see how hard this is, Katie and I walked through the process of creating, uploading and distributing our own podcasts. First, you have to record the audio. Since few desktop computers have microphones, you will likely have to buy one, or use a laptop with a built-in mike. We each used a microphone-earphone headset that plugged into our computers for one test, and used a phone for another. (We’ll explain that later.)

For her first podcast, Katie downloaded the Audacity MP3 recorder for Windows, free recording software. She spoke into the microphone and recorded a simple test file, but had to follow some confusing steps to save the file in MP3 format. I recorded a similar simple test podcast using the free GarageBand program on a Macintosh (which is unrelated to the aforementioned GarageBand Web site). Again, this involved configuration and file conversion steps that were a pain.

The GarageBand Web site (www.garageband.com) offers a quick, convenient alternative: It lets you dial a toll-free number and dictate your podcast over the phone. Katie and I tested this method from landline phones and from cellphones, and we were very impressed by how easy it was to do and with how good it sounded.

Who Will Host Your Podcast?

After recording a podcast, you must figure out where to post it — on a Web site or on a personal blog with an RSS (really simple syndication) feed. (RSS allows Web browsers and other software to present constantly updated summaries of the headlines on a blog.) Unfortunately, the big blog-hosting sites such as Blogger.com and MSN Spaces, don’t offer provisions for hosting podcasts. This is probably because podcasts are audio files that require much more online storage than regular blogs without audio.

Again, the GarageBand Web site came to the rescue. It is willing to host podcasts, assigning a Web address to each and providing RSS syndication for them. But there were several sometimes confusing steps to do this at GarageBand, mainly because the site was really created to help people find new music. For instance, any audio content you wish to add to your podcast must first be loaded into a “Master Playlist,” which is managed from a separate part of the GarageBand service.

GarageBand.com has a simple player built right into it, so we could hear our recordings right away. With a little knowledge, you can post this tiny player directly into the HTML version of a text blog.

I did this by opening the HTML guts of my personal blog on Blogger.com and embedding the player. It works so that users can hear the podcast as soon as the site opens. Try it out at waltmossberg.blogspot.com.

Distributing Your Podcast

Apple’s newest version of iTunes is a real help for folks who have recorded podcasts but don’t know how to distribute them. You start by going to a section of the iTunes store called Publish a Podcast.

The main piece of information you need to give Apple is the Web address for the syndicated feed of your podcast. Nontechies might not know this. GargageBand.com tells you, but unless you know what you’re looking for, you may be stumped.

We pasted our podcast feed addresses into the correct space in iTunes, then entered our iTunes account passwords, and added some information that would display in the iTunes catalog of podcasts, including our names, a short and long description of the podcast, and a category for the podcast (we chose Technology as the category and Podcasting as the subcategory). In this section, you can also mark your podcast as “Explicit.” My podcast took four days to show up in iTunes, and Katie’s still hasn’t been cleared for listening as I write this.

It’s still way too complicated for the average user to create a podcast. Apple has solved one part of the problem, but more solutions are needed.

With reporting by Katherine Boehret

Write to Walter S. Mossberg at mossberg@wsj.com