An announcement by South Korea Electronic firm LG, says they are about to release a YouTube enabled phone in Europe by the end of this year. This will allow users to capture video directly on their phone and upload it to YouTube. They have got some kind of deal going on with Google (YouTube’s parent company) to make it all official. The thing is, the iPhone has YouTube functionality too, but from what I have heard it is limited. Well, first off the iPhone doesn’t record video, yet. This is good reason to wait for the 2nd or 3rd generation models and I am surprised that this has been omitted. Secondly, the YouTube clips accessible by the iPhone are specially transcoded for it and are few in numbers at the moment. This kind of defeats the purpose really.

The way I see it is that there should not be exclusivity with any one particular video hosting site. YouTube may be the big kid on the block but there are plenty of other and far better services… Stage6, Dailymotion, Blip.tv, & Revver to name just a few. What is being done here is selling by association. YouTube is so well known it is being used as a word for ‘video on the web’ much like Google is used for ‘search the web’ (although I hope it doesn’t quite come into lingo as much as that). Video has been on phones for ages as has the ability to upload them to websites. It is an underused feature of phones as are much of the multimedia features, especially here in Europe. For one it is still very expensive to use data services on your phone and until flat rates are introduced (and at low cost) people won’t use them. This is especially true here in Ireland, where the main mobile phone operators have being dragging their heels on this for years.

If the iPhone has full web access via Safari, then surely YouTube can be accessed form here and in full. The same should apply to all other video sites. Also, because it is built on OSX it should surely support third party codecs. After all the “i” in in iPhone should mean “mine” or “individual”, do with it what you want, just like your computer.

Like all new technology that is released, the manufacturers will deliberatley withhold certain features which could be implemented from the get go, so that they can advertise new features on future releases. This is fair enough, but the original models should not have this functionality and have it locked away from the user. Many things do.

The iPhone is certainly a unique device and other electronics makers will be started to release products which were originally meant to be future upgrades to existing products (for the above stated marketing purposes) much sooner. So kudos to Apple for pushing the boat out so far, but I hope that the make it less exclusive, i.e. it’s your phone, to with it as you like!