There have been several YouTube players for Windows Mobile, two of them being, in my opinion, the best: the commercial, but highly recommended CorePlayer (which, with the recent, 1.3.0 upgrade, has fixed almost all the problems I’ve talked about in my dedicated all-in-one bible) and the free FlashVideoBundle. While some of the alternatives (for example, Kinoma Play with the built-in YouTube support and the recently released Flash Lite 3.1) offer more functionalities (for example, built-in account support in Kinoma) and/or better (more “natural”) browser integration, in my opinion, these two players still remain the best choices for YouTube playback, particularly if you have a VGA device.

Enter YouTube’s own player. First of all, before you run to download it: at the current state, I in no way recommend it. It’s in every way worse than CorePlayer: it’s less polished, uses much more CPU for playback and is simply not optimized for being played back on VGA devices, resulting in sometimes ridiculous frame rates. It doesn’t support videos with greater resolution than QVGA either, which is bad news for (W)VGA users having enjoyed the higher-resolution HVGA (480*320) H.264 movies. It seems not to able to work (connect) on some phones; for example, using exactly the same WLAN network, I was able to play back videos (hmmm… more like slideshows on this VGA unit) on my HP iPAQ 210 but couldn’t do the same on my HTC Wizard and HTC Universal phones and my Dell Axim x51v – they complained about connection errors. Again, all this under exactly the same (networking) circumstances.

All in all, it seems this title is worse as the official Symbian version (see 1.3 Using the official YouTube MIDlet, YouTube for Mobile (beta) (currently, Symbian)) of YouTube’s player.