YouTube mobile web review

So HTML5 is one of those buzzwords that everyone from Steve Jobs to your favorite freelancer are throwing around these days, meant to signify “its cool cause it’s not Flash” and all. The folks at Google have already done a wonderful job iPhonifying their portals and YoutTube is the latest to get a nice revamp to bring it up to speed with the latest HTML5 buzz.

So why should you care? After all your iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, all come with a native YouTube app already. Video quality is better compared to the iPhone native application. Basically you’ll get iPad quality videos on your iPhone. You can actually pick to view high quality HD version of videos if available by tapping the red “HQ” button or opt for normal format possibly when you are on 3G. It turns out also some speed improvements are in place, and using the web can feel more natural to users, especially when already browsing in Safari. I’m not sure about this but I would think that the web version would also be updated faster with new posts than the native app given that its web based, but I could be wrong about that.

Additional improvements over the previous mobile web version of YouTube include a cleaner, larger interface with touch-friendly buttons and quick search results. Finally for the small population of users who move across devices like iPhone and Android phones, having a uniform web based portal is also a nice to have feature from YouTube. One final improvement you get on the iPhone webapp version: Landscape support! This is actually quite cool to have.

Here is a video demo of the YouTube mobile web app on the iPhone

Note: This is a web application. You just open it in your Safari browser by entering the URL youtube.com

AppSafari Rating: 4/5

AppSafari review of YouTube mobile web was written by Joe Seifi on July 7th, 2010 and categorized under Video, Webapps. Page viewed 8248 times, 2 so far today. Need help on using these apps? Please read the Help Page.