Yesterday, Google Labs released an Android app for finding and listening to podcasts and other audio called Google Listen.

Tried it out just a bit so far, and I have to say, it’s impressive. It works great. Streaming is smooth, and you also have the option of saving to the SD card for offline listening. There were little, extremely minor hiccups when I ran other apps while listening, but hardly worth mentioning. I was on 3G, but in a spot where I don’t get the strongest signal in the world.

While you’re listening to a podcast, you can hit Menu and then Share to get a full slate of sharing options, including apps you’ve installed with that capability. So for me, I can share podcasts via Gmail, SMS, Twitter (via Twidroid), Delicious (via Beelicious) and Tumblr (via aTumble). Pretty great!

With Listen, you can subscribe to search results rather than individual feeds. It’s a great idea—like Google Alerts for podcasts—and works well for niche topics; I’m happy with the search results I got for “Android” and have subscribed to them.

If you’re looking for a particular show rather than a topic, the results will appear too broad. For example, If I search for “This American Life,” sure enough, the first result is the latest episode of that show. But all the rest of the results are other NPR shows that are not TAL. But this is easily remedied: tapping on the episode of the feed you’re interested in will take you to a detail page, where you can bring up more episodes of the same and subscribe to that specific feed.

What is missing is the ability to manually specify a feed address; if the podcast you’re looking for doesn’t come up in the search results, you’re out of luck. Google’s Listen FAQ says that “for now, Listen only indexes English audio podcasts. We don’t yet index video or other languages.” And I’ve heard that English-language BBC podcasts are missing from the index. But remember, this is Labs, it’s brand new. The index will grow.

Finally, it’s no surprise that Listen just burns through my G1’s battery. And because I’m using a dongle, I can’t use it while plugged in. That’s not an issue with Listen tho; it’s an issue with the G1. And desite the warning in the FAQ to “wear safety glasses” because it’s still full of bugs, but I haven’t run into any yet.

The official Google apps for Android so far have all been high quality. Listen is no exception.