Posted on June 18, 2007 at 1:44 PM in experiments
Note: The below is an archived entry from Earthling, formerly EarthLink's official blog. The blog itself has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, and comments are trackbacks are no longer accepted.
YouTube released a free, mobile device friendly version of their site at m.youtube.com. I browsed it this morning on my Helio Ocean -- to get there on an Ocean choose Surf, and then hit the right-hand key for "Go" and then type in the URL.
One of the first things you see when you pull up the site is this warning:
"Information: YouTube Mobile is a data intensive application. We highly recommend that you upgrade to an unlimited data plan with your mobile service provider to avoid additional charges."
It's nice of them to remind people that on many phone plans data is metered and costly. This would also be a nice message for Twitter to incorporate into their sign up process re: SMS charges if they haven't already. Nothing to worry about if you're on the Helio all-in data inclusive plans.
Update: Viewing Mobile YouTube via the Helio Ocean again appears to work for free, no additional signup required. There's been a change to the way m.youtube.com works on the Ocean and now it appears there's a required subscription to the Video Virus add-on to sign up. More information here and I will add more as I hear from Helio. Gizmodo has some additional information and describes a workaround that seems to work.
When you click to continue on, you get to a list of popular video clips and a search box down at the bottom. The search box was a little tricky to find the first time, but eventually I got there. I searched for "Chappelle," hoping to find clips from Chappelle's Show. The two clips it returned were Michel Gondry solving a Rubik's Cube with his feet, and a fake ad for a Steven Seagal Lightning Bolt drink. The tags the authors have added to the clips aren't visible in the mobile version, so it's hard to say for sure why these showed up in this search, but likely the authors tagged them "Chappelle" so they'd show up more often. Search regular YouTube for "Chappelle" and you get 5,030 results, some of which do seem to have something to do with Dave Chappelle.
Needless to say, the content choices are pretty limited right now. The "most viewed video" is currently this, a baby laughing. Ah, the wisdom of small crowds. I guess they haven't brought over much of the actual YouTube catalog, though the messaging in the application tells you they're working feverishly on that.
Other than the catalog shortcomings, the overall experience is pretty neat. The video plays clearly and keeps sync with the audio track, and YouTube automatically detects your phone's video player software and uses that to display the clip. It was very easy to use on the Ocean. I'll be interested to read how it works on other phones and devices.
For more mobile optimized user-contributed video sites to try on your phone, take a look at GigaOm's round-up of the options.
Comments
Today I was showing the Nokia 95 to Paul Baricos, my new boss, at the New Orleans Housing Resource Center. I mentioned the phone, noting that it had a 5 mpx camera. Then I showed him Flickr's Yahoo! Map of the Central Business District.
Now, basically, we're imagining how insanely useful it would be to photograph our neighborhood, Hollygrove, and to walk with the block captains and make a map of issues that need attention.
Helio Ocean has the GPS. How's the camera?
Posted by Alan Gutierrez | June 18, 2007 10:44 PM
The Ocean's camera is what I use for everyday snapshots. It's a 2MP.
Unlike the N95, the Ocean's GPS talks to Google Maps for Mobile, so when I want to look something up now I usually do the search straight from the Google Maps app, and use my current location as the starting point. I haven't used an N95 myself, but I've heard it takes it minutes to get a GPS fix. It's really quick on the Ocean -- more like seconds.
The Ocean also lets you geotag photos via the Helio UP button. As you save them you can associate them with a place name and that place gets geotagged coordinates. To answer your likely next question, today when I send a photo to Flickr from my Ocean, Flickr doesn't read or grab the geotags that I can tell. But I've heard Helio will be doing a bunch more with the Ocean around location-based media apps and social apps and services soon. I'll be writing more about that when I hear all of the details.
Posted by Dave C. | June 19, 2007 3:04 PM