I would like to listen to podcasts while driving. I bought an iPod a few years ago and thought I would take it with me in the evening and sync-up podcasts for the next day's drive (my car has an USB connector suitable for iPods). However, I never developed a habbit of taking the iPod with me and thus it now contains only music.

I recently got an Android phone and that rekindled my desire to listen to podcasts on the road. I figured that it could automatically download podcasts and all I have to do is figure out a way to get the podcast played over my car's stereo. Connecting my phone to my car's USB port might work (I haven't tested that yet), but I don't want to have to fiddle with the USB cable every day (yes, I am lazy like that).

My preferred solution was to have the podcasts streamed over bluetooth to play on my car's stereo. However, my car only supports the HSF bluetooth profile (designed to trasmit voice calls to headsets) and not the A2DP profile (for high-quality music content). Thus, I would need to figure out a way to get Android to transmit the audio content via HSF to my car. I stumbled across various posts in which some people wrote about their own unsuccessful efforts to accomplish this. I remember one posts that contained a statement by some Android developer that only phone conversations are supported for HSF. It said something like "android does not support app processor generated audio data for HSF" (referring to the "main"/"app" CPU in the phone - instead of the "media"/"phone" processor which handles all phone-related processing).

While I do think that it should be plausible to hack something together for rooted Androids, I don't see that on my to-do list for now. Instead, I am currently investigating another solution: exploit the fact that my phone contract has a flat rate for calling land-line phone numbers. I am thinking of setting up an asterisk instance that I can call (phone call, not VoIP) and have it play back my podcasts. It would consist of two components: a web frontend for managing podcast subscriptions and the asterisk logic for handling incoming calls in order to navigate through the podcasts and to actually play them. Although this solution is not as technically challenging as hacking audio support for HFP for Android, it's probably the more appealing solution for others.

By the way: for those who are eager to investigate the bluetooth HFP implementation in Android, here are the relevant Android source files:

• ScoSocket.java
• android_bluetooth_ScoSocket.cpp
• BluetootHandsfree.java

Update: If your in Germany then check out http://www.phonecaster.de/ - it does exactly what I wanted to implement myself. I may not pursue my idea anymore...