Many of you have heard that the new version of iTunes (4.9) will have capabilities of subscribing to and downloading Podcasts. Oh joy! Did Apple just make life even easier? Is that even possible? It seems so.

Steve Jobs demoed iTunes 4.9 at the latest WWDC. I wasn't at all shocked to see how easy the process was to subscribe and download Podcasts. Apple gathered 8,000 Podcasts and threw them into their music store.

Apple itself also released a Podcast to it's New Music Tuesdays section of the store. It's pretty simple and has a DJ that tells you about and lets you listen to samples of new music. The cool part about Apple's Podcast is the album art switching as the 'cast goes on. The current sample of the song playing displays new artwork in the artwork section of iTunes and switches as the samples switch. Pretty sweet.

Will this kill apps like iPodder? Probably not. But there will be a lot of healthy competition playing out in the coming months.

iTunes 4.9 with Podcast support should be out within the next 30 days.

::Looks at watch::

--InX

I personally prefer Winamp to iTunes. Mostly because it's just a simple media player. I only use iTunes on my Mac. I know I'll continue to use iPodder when it comes to catching podcasts, but the idea of iTunes doing it is really really cool.