vTap Login screen
Our dearest cellphone, 5800 has often been referred to as Tube 5800 for its video and music playback capabilities. This is kinda misnomer with no dedicated YouTube application for the s60 5th edition in market today. Thanks to vTap, Nokia 5800 can now live up to its name of Tube 5800 with support for every flash based video out there on the web today. If a flash video is out there on the web, you can definitely take a look at it, from your 5800 via vTap. Such is the capability of this amazing application.
Installation
Like they say, "The best things in life are for free", and vTap seem to believe in this philosophy and have made the application available as a free download at their official website here. At around 370 kb vTap has been packed into a very compact package for an installation file and even after installation it takes up around 700 kb on the phone memory or memory card depending on where you install it. In all, the installation is straightforward and is done in a matter of seconds.
Video Categories
Features
The USP of vTap is its search capabilities which works pretty much like searching in indexed locations on a windows PC; meaning videos are shortlisted with each letter typed, as and when typed. This makes finding a video on the web much easier and faster.
Users can link vTap to their YouTube accounts, and record videos on their 5800 and upload them on YouTube, all within the same application. However, when I clicked on uploaded video in my YouTube account, the application couldn't list the video uploaded by me. I even tried to upload a video from vTap and even this didn't show any items in the uploaded videos section for me. This may be a bug in the application or may be I did something wrong, which I doubt. I would like to read from our readers if they are facing similar problem or found a way around it.
As I mentioned earlier, the application can find any flash based video out on the web and if you don't know what you are looking for, you can always browse through the different videos indexed in appropriate categories from the home-screen. Check the gallery below for some screenshots of hits for TV shows category.
Pros
- Video search is fast
- Indexing of videos is very helpful
Cons
- Not one of the best video qualities when compared to streaming from YouTube client
- Not optimized for finger touch browsing
- Some of the videos displayed in search results cannot be played
Verdict
vTap is a great application, no doubt but it does need some fine tuning, especially in optimizing the interface for finger touch browsing. The search button is so minute and is placed in the top right corner of the screen, making it very difficult to reach without the help of the stylus. Also the developers need to account for unavailability of some of the videos shown in the search results as well as indexed locations. However vTap is a very useful application for searching for flash videos on the web and highly recommended for video browsing on 5800.
Homescreen
TV-Shows Listing
Video hits for TV show-Lost
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really great !!!!!!!!
wow…lucky contest again…nice to roll in…..i deaply support….i’m in…i want to get the software again…..the best luck is mine……yahooooooooooo
Like they say, “The best things in life are for free“
Upon this site’s recommendation, I installed it and ran it for about 2 days. Nothing but frustration. 1) Some videos didn’t work 2) Unstable on firmware v21: Application would randomly exit, once it froze up my phone all together . Essentially every other time I used it, it would either crash or freeze.
Searching for videos was very unintuitive I found. Lots of duplicate videos come up, but half of them don’t work so you spend time looking for one that works.
Either way.. wasn’t impressed.
@Szymon: I agree with your observations some of which have already been mentioned in the cons.. Till a dedicated YouTube client for the s60 5th edition is released, we have to be happy either with these third party solutions or the s60v3 edition, ported to s60v5, reviewed here
Of course you’re right. Maybe I just had higher hopes for this app when I installed it. Also I’m not quite sure I understood how it functions. Instead of searching youtube and the likes directly, it seemed to be searching some other database (or youtube but using some sort of other algorithm) . Because typing the same search terms into vtap and youtube returns a whole different set of results, which made for more confusion when looking for stuff. But that is more of a fault in my understanding of what the app does than apps fault.
Either way, your continued reviews for apps are always appreciated. I found things through here I would never have thought existed.