YouTube Updates Mobile Site for iPhone, other Smartphones

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YouTube announced a new version of its mobile Web site on Thursday that’s better optimized for Apple’s iPhone and other smartphone devices.

The updated video viewing interface sports bigger touch elements designed to be easier to tap with your finger, includes search suggestions, the ability to build playlists, support for tagging favorite videos, and more. YouTube is still supporting H.264 encoded videos, too, for playback on the iPhone, iPod touch, iPad and Apple TV.

The company is also touting the fact that it can roll out new updates to its Web interface faster than native app developers can.

iPhone and other smartphone users can check out the available videos at the YouTube mobile Web site.

Jeff Gamet

Jeff Gamet

Jeff is the Mac Observer's Managing Editor, and co-host of the Apple Context Machine podcast. He is the author of "The Designer's Guide to Mac OS X" from Peachpit Press, and writes for several design-related publications. Jeff has presented at events such as Macworld Expo, the RSA Conference, and the Mac Computer Expo. In all his spare time, he also co-hosts the We Have Communicators podcast, and makes guest appearances on several other podcasts, too. Jeff dreams in HD.

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3 Comments

Lee Dronick

Has the new sight been turned on? I just visited YouTube from my iPhone using Safari and it looked pretty nice. However, this is the first time that I used my iPhone to access YouTube without using their app so i can not compare old and new.

Bosco (Brad Hutchings)

@Sir Harry… The appropriate comparison would be to the YouTube app made by Apple.

Admittedly, I haven’t touched my 3GS in over a month, and I don’t feel like digging it up now, but IIRC, you can’t remove the YouTube app from your phone. It’s just gonna sit there like an anchor and take up space until Apple decides to let you. Of course, I could be totally wrong on this with iOS 4.

The astute Observer will notice that this is the second time Google has gone to the browser to stick it to Apple. The first was with Google Voice. Web apps may finally gain the prominence they should have had with the early iPhone, especially with the adoption of WebKit mobile browsers and mobile Flash 10.1.

Jamie

I actually think it’s interesting how the tide has reversed regarding web apps-I remember the collective sigh of disappointment when the original iPhone debuted without a ‘real’ developer’s environment and how badly the web apps were poo-poohed at the time.

And yes, I so wish Apple would let me trash that stupid YouTube app that I’ve used exactly once! smile I shouldn’t be forced to jailbreak my phone just to free up space on the disk. Is anyone at Apple listening?

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