Symbian in Motion

emTube Quenches Your Thirst for YouTube

Since the dawn of Flashlite and S60, convergence enthusiasts have waited for an application that would allow them to fully access the Holy Grail of time wasting and entertainment - YouTube.

Whilst Flashlite 2.1 gave us optimism and a taste of what’s to come we could only anticipate the days when we would have full access to sites such as Youtube on our S60 device. With the release of Flashlite 3 for developers it was only inevitable something would come along to finally give us what we have craved for.

Samir Oueldi gave us YTPlayer which was reviewed here a while back and showed us the way. It gave us access to YouTube but with restrictions. Whilst YTPlayer is a very good application and can be seen as the catalyst, emTube simply expands on this and takes it a few steps further. Created by Sebastian Jedruszkiewicz, it has full integration of the same features you would have when browsing the YouTube website itself and direct access to the huge catalogue of videos available on YouTube directly on your S60 handset.

Moving on…

Starting up emTube brings you to the main screen which gives you the options to search, view featured, top rated, most viewed and your favourites. Most of these are self explanatory do what exactly what they say. Selecting any one of the options will show you a thumbnail list (set to 5 at a time by default) of the results along with their ratings, title and author. Highlighting any of the results and hitting options pulls up a menu list of options available to the user which include the ability to view, download, check the details of the actual clip, add to favourites, find other related videos and find other user videos by this author.

The most interesting out of these options are the details and download. It’s advisable to view the details of the clips before starting to view it as obviously streaming videos is bandwidth intensive and also good to know how long or large a clip maybe before opting to view it. I’m glad to say emTube does this perfectly as it gives you a very detailed description of the actual clip. Title, Author, Duration, View Count and Average Rating are all included, but what is missing is the actual size of the clip, something which would be a welcomed option to have.

Playing and downloading videos is extremely easy. There are two options: the ability to download and view videos from YouTube or play a local file saved on your handset / Memory Card. The latter is done via the addition of flv recognition, another great feature that is ideal for those without a fast connection available to them on the go so they can view their clips downloaded or transferred using a desktop computer. I would advise that users make use of a WiFi connection when viewing clips from YouTube on the handset as even HSDPA takes a while to load longer clips and view them.

Whilst viewing clips there are some cool OSD controls that show the volume level, progress bar and pause and play buttons. Aesthetically these are very good added features as they give the user a good understanding and control over what is happening. One of the greatest features is the use of the built in accelerometer (Nokia N95 only) which changes the orientation of the screen depending on the angle of the handset, seriously cool! It’s great to see applications making use of this.

One thing I would like to bring to attention is the fact this application comes with its own user guide in PDF format and a list of bug fixes - a fantastic touch, as this gives you the option to know exactly how the development is going and also understand and troubleshoot if you are having problems. emTube does a fantastic job of both providing what the user wants and showing us that great developers can bring wonderful applications to the S60 platform if given the proper tools. What’s even better is that the application is FREEWARE! Note however that emTube is currently unsigned so you will still need to sign the application yourself.

You can donate to Sebastian Jedruszkiewicz via Paypal if you like this application, and he deserves it in my opinion! You can also report bugs and errors to him via the emTube homepage.

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