Symbiosis60

Today YouTube announced a new mobile client beta. After playing with it for a few minutes I have to say that there are features that i like and some which i dislike. To be honest for now the list of the "dislikes" is a bit longer than that "likes".

The first thing that stands out is "my account" section. This is something i miss from emTube which I will be comparing this client to. I do have a few subscribed channels on YouTube so viewing them instead of searching for each user is a nice feature. Another strike is the lack of full screen support. If this is an application that is supposed to allow you to entertain then it should be playable in full screen mode and not just a postage stamp size window. It seems like the whole interface is flash based. The side volume buttons on N95 do not work with this release (maybe in the future). Another strike I noticed is the lack of "auto rotation". Come on people... it's there so why not use it. Scrolling down the list of "dislikes" is a weird behaviour...when the backlight timed out and the phone's screensaver came on, video playback stopped. I had to press any button to "wake up" the program. This may be a "feature" but in my book it's crap. The program should sense that you're playing something and disallow the phone to go into screen saver mode. There's not even an option in the menu to keep the backlight on. Next was the impossibility to save the files locally which for obvious reasons is a copyright protection feature but it still would be nice to have it. Overall I'm not impressed with this application. At this point my list of cons is way too long to like this application. It sort of reminds me of Yahoo GO java client...it's too limited, takes over the phone too much, doesn't feel like native Symbian application (which i believe it is) and for the time being I think I'll stick with emTube from Sebastian (download from http://www.emtube.yoyo.pl/ )