My Nokia E90 And I

Another audio and video application review for the E90. This time I shall be reviewing Sebastian Jedruszkiewicz's emTube, my most used video downloading application (I use this more than Nokia Podcasting now). The application allows you stream and download videos from YouTube and play your own flash video files in your phone. I shall also compare it with a mobile website, vTap, which allows you to stream or download videos from YouTube and other sites.

Software Download
The application can be downloaded here

It is freeware, so go on and download it!

My Review
When I first got my E90 I was expecting the browser to support Flash sites such as YouTube. But sadly, there isn't support for it just yet. Then, when Flash Lite 3 was announced, I was hoping that it could play flash video files through the default flash player. But, again, it couldn't. Fortunately, emTube was created and this allowed for streaming and downloading videos from YouTube as well as watching all those flash videos I downloaded. Before, emTube was out, I also stumbled upon a mobile website, vTap which gave me similar streaming and downloading capabilities.


Let me first start by comparing emTube and vTap with the YouTube website.




As you can see above, emTube has exactly the same search results as the YouTube site but vTap only has certain similar results.



Here we have featured videos. The results on emTube are different than those on YouTube.



Here are the most viewed videos, and like the featured videos, the results are different.



Above we have emTube playing the video Nokia E90 by teknomag while vTap offers the option to stream or download the video. emTube streams the video in .flv format while vTap converts the video into .3gp format. After loading the full video, emTube allows you to save the video onto your phone. As for vTap, to download the video you would need to choose which quality you want to save it in.

Here are some pros and cons for both emTube and vTap, based on my opinion:

emTube

• Pros
• Can stream and then save a video into your phone
• Does not require any conversion of YouTube videos
• Can be used as an .flv player
  
• Cons
• Cannot download multiple files at once
• It lags a bit for certain videos

vTap

• Pros
• Can download multiple files at once (Since it's using the browser)
• Can choose quality of video
• Can stream/download from other sites such as Daily Motion, CNN, etc
  
• Cons
• The file is converted into .3gp format (Some quality loss)
• Cannot stream and then save file into phone

Although both have pros and cons, I don't see why we can't use them both since they are both free to use.

Reviewed Version - v1.06

*Update*
v1.08 - A new version of emTube is out which reduces the lag in videos but in this version, video upscaling has been disabled which means that we can't zoom videos.

v1.10 - Another update and this time some bugs have been fixed (though I didn't notice any while using the previous versions), you can search for restricted content and you can play FLV files generated by the Super conversion program. It's too bad that video upscaling is still disabled, and I find some videos to have out of sync audio.