Update (1pm ET): The Windows Phone Store link is now active
For those of you who commute or find yourself traveling a lot, you’ll soon be able to make your life a lot more interesting as 121Cast's SoundGecko app has finally landed for Windows Phone. We wrote on SoundGecko earlier in anticipation of the app and that day is just about upon us.
The app has passed Windows Phone certification and is just waiting to be “pushed” to the Store. Windows Phone Central managed to get our hands on it slightly early and we’re more than glad to give you the tour in the video above.
The service, found at www.soundgecko.com, is free for the basic level and it allows you to convert 30 articles a month into audio format. The service works by finding a web link of a story you want to listen to later and sending it to SoundGecko (you can even use the nifty Chrome plugin to automate the process).
That article is then converted on the fly to audio and then streamed to your PC or in our case, Windows Phone, directly. With the free account, you also get one RSS feed to automatically convert without any work on your end.
If you want to go bigger, you can try the Plus ($4.95 a month) or Pro ($7.95 a month) accounts, which offer more articles (100 and 300, respectively) and more RSS feeds.
The service works remarkably well—it’s fast, simple and the audio text is eerily human-like. It’s not a perfect narration by a human but it’s darn close.
The Windows Phone app is quite basic—you have ‘My List’ that contains your stories and ‘Popular’, which has what other folks are listening too. The app streams, not downloads the file, so you will need to use data. Other than your account info, you can mark articles as played, share or delete them.
SoundGecko is an amazing service. Commuters will certainly love the ease of use and the audio quality is fantastic. With it now being on Windows Phone, users will be able to take the service on the go and for that, we approve.
SoundGecko is now available here in the Windows Phone Store.
Daniel Rubino is the Executive Editor of Windows Central, head reviewer, podcast co-host, and analyst. He has been covering Microsoft here since 2007, back when this site was called WMExperts (and later Windows Phone Central). His interests include Windows, Microsoft Surface, laptops, next-gen computing, and arguing with people on the internet.
