Apple's iPhone becomes yPhone

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 21 June 2007 21:42

Your IT - Mobility

The iPhone looks like it won’t support Flash but will still allow users to watch YouTube video clips thanks to a dedicated viewer that supports the newly H.264 encoded YouTube video format.

Just as the Apple TV is now YouTube compatible thanks to the H.264 format that YouTube’s video collection is being re-encoded with, so too is the iPhone able to display YouTube’s H.264 videos thanks to a special player iPhone users will see when visiting YouTube’s site.

Currently only 10,000 of YouTube’s clips have been converted thus far, but YouTube is promising to have their entire collection progressively re-encoded over the next few weeks and months, ensuring a steady stream of new videos for iPhone users who are also YouTube fanatics.

Steve Jobs said in a statement that “Now users can enjoy YouTube wherever they are — on their iPhone, on their Mac or on a widescreen TV in their living room with Apple TV”.

With the iPhone only a few days away, revelations of improved battery life and an improved screen have only added to the iHype over the past few days. The YouTube announcement has sent the hype meter off the scale once again.

Naturally, some are still expressing doubts about the iPhone while others claim it will be the best selling phone in history. Some have even dubbed the iPhone the ‘Jesus Phone’ or the ‘God Machine’.

Look, it’s just a phone, iPod and multimedia computer-in-one, and a version 2.0 with 3G or better access, and likely more memory, will come out in 2008, most likely.

But what a phone it is. Still, it does remind me of Sony’s PSP in one way. When news of the PSP drew ever closer, we just naturally thought it would have a TV-out option. At the local PSP launch, now a couple of years ago, we were astonished to discover it didn’t have a TV out option – something that seemed like such a no-brainer, and something that may have led to the demise of the PSP's UMD movie disc format.

Now onto the iPhone. We know it can output video – we saw it during the Macworld keynote. But Steve Jobs alluded that it was a special setup – and there was no indication as to whether or not consumers would have this capability.

Other phones can do this - will the iPhone be able to? Please read onto page 2 for the conclusion...