Published by David Gilson at 7:30 UTC, January 5th 2012
Summary:
Symbian^3 users have had something of a rough time when it comes to enjoying YouTube. Fortunately, cuteTube, now at v1.06, is at hand to save the day, offering a comprehensive range of features, including uploading and downloading videos. Since the official YouTube client was affected by login issues and third party clients have taken the form of downloaders, cuteTube is a refreshing change. Read on to find out all of its features.
cuteTube opens up with four options, "My Channel", "Search", "Categories" and "Archive". The first of these is where you'll access most of the application's functions. The Search page gives an elaborate set of controls to find the content you're looking for. Categories launches a pop up menu which scrolls through all of YouTube's content categories. Lastly, Archive gives you a list of videos you've either downloaded or added to the local "Watch later" playlist. More on all of these as we go.
The main menu
The My Channel page starts off by showing a summary of your account, and has a row of six buttons along the top that lead you to all the usual content sections. The first button links to the account summary, the rest link to your uploads, recommended videos, favourite videos, your playlists and your subscriptions.
Account Summary
cuteTube uses a bar at the bottom of the screen to host the back and menu buttons, as found in all applications using the SymbianNokia Belle user interface pattern. On the uploaded, recommended and favourite videos lists, the menu key has no effect. However, the menu button will allow you, respectively, to create new playlists and view a list of latest videos from your subscriptions.
Some of cuteTube's menu options
From the account summary page, you have a menu option to upload videos. This is another feature that sets cuteTube apart from all other YouTube applications on Symbian. On the upload page, you have all the same entry fields that are present on YouTube's upload page. The file selector in cuteTube is well presented and easy to use too.
Uploading videos with cuteTube
When you tap through to a video's page, you are offered a very similar experience to the desktop YouTube website. You can read information about the video, and tap on the 'like' or 'dislike' buttons. There are tabs at the top of the screen to let you view the comments and related videos too. Tags (keywords) are shown at the bottom of the video, but they are not hyperlinked - so you can't call up a list of videos with common tags.
Viewing video information
Via the menu, you can add a video to your YouTube playlists, including your favourites and watch later lists, and download YouTube's MP4 copy of the video. Downloaded videos are added to the Archive list - the fourth option on the main menu. You can also add the video to your locally stored playback list, which is accessed via the blue heading on cuteTube's main menu - as are active downloads.
Menu options for videos
From the page for each video, there's sadly no way to directly change the streaming quality. By going to the Settings page (which is found via the menu button on cuteTube's main page), you will find settings for 360p, 480p, 720p and 1080p in the Media/Content section, but these settings are for download only - streams are restricted to 360p which optimised for the standard Symbian screen resolution, and beats the official client. You will also find an option to change the download directory in the same settings section. Elsewhere in Settings you can find settings for many more aspects of the application. Of interest to parents will be the "Safe Search" option. You can also, thankfully, change the theme of the application with "light" and "dark" being the two options.
Comprehensive options can be found in the settings menu
Now that we've covered the basics, is there anything I want to complain about with cuteTube? Not really - although I should state for the record that one thing you can't do with cuteTube is share videos to social networks.
Videos are streamed, at an optimised resolution, via Symbian's video player
As stated at the top of this review, Symbian^3 users have had something of a raw deal when it comes to enjoying YouTube. Google's official client has a bug that prevents some people from logging into their account - which limits the usability of the application, plus it uses very low quality video streams. Third party solutions have just been glorified downloaders - and often very buggy with it. Meanwhile, cuteTube has brought the (almost) complete YouTube experience - plus download ability - to Symbian as a native Qt application. Stewart Howarth, cuteTube's author, should be commended for this effort.
For anyone who has used cuteTube in the past and found videos would not download, it's worth looking at the latest 1.06, as this problem has been fixed. cuteTube 1.06 is currently not available on the Nokia Store, but you can download it for free via Stewart's blog. Note that you might need to install some Qt files first, as per the instructions, depending on how up to date your smartphone is.
Highly Recommended.
David Gilson, 5th Jan 2012
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