YouTube was undoubtedly one of the Big G's best acquisitions. For good or for bad, it's addictive. While watching short, low resolution video clips is hardly an activity you want to do from your HDTV (or even really large computer monitor), it's actually a nice thing to do on a smartphone, especially if you are in a long line.

We can thank the iPhone for saying "no" to Flash and getting YouTube to provide .h264 videos for its YouTube app because Android doesn't have to mess with Flash either (though Silverlight is a possibility). The YouTube implementaton is very similar to the implementation on the iPhone.

The Android version, unsurprisingly, has a bit more pizzazz. When you load the app, in addition to a listing of videos like on the iPhone, there is a top carousel of different categories featuring videos and you can then click on each category to get more previews. It's a nice touch.

Playback is nearly identical to the experience on the iPhone. The screen automatically switches to landscape mode and playback starts. If the connection is weakened or cut, the video stops and ports you back to the main page. You can advance through the video by dragging your finger across the screen or using the little trackball to control the cursor.

As I covered yesterday, if you see a YouTube clip embedded in another site or in a Google News piece, you are given the option to load the video in the browesr or in the YouTube app. Because Flash is absent, you ned to select "open in YouTube."

I'm pretty addicted to Twitter, so the very first application I sought out for Grant's T-Mobile G1 was an Android-based Twitter client. Unsurprisingly, the Android Market didn't have anything to meet my needs, but I did manage to stumble upon Twitroid, which as far as I can tell, is the only Android-based Twitter client available at this time.

Although the first official release will not be available until Monday (and the devs expect it in the Android Market shortly after), you can download the 0.7 pre-release version from twitroid.mobi. First, you need to enable "Unknown Sources" in the Applications settings on your device (Settings > Applications > check "Unknown Sources"), but after that, it is a simple OTA installation.

Because Twitroid was still in beta at the time of my test, I'm not going to grouse over the error messages and some of the quirk I experienced, but I do want to point out that those bugs did not negatively impact the rest of the device or any of its software. When the app crashed (really, I got a time-out message and was forced to choose "Force close"), the rest of the device continued to work swimmingly. Actually, Twitroid still continued to work, I just got a lot of "not responding" messages. After covering and reading about so many bugs and crashes in pre-2.1 iPhone firmware for TUAW, this was a bit of a relief. Even if something crashes, it does not appear to be the end of the world.

Aside from any beta bugs, Twitroid is a very nice Twitter client. It provides an easy way to send messages, take pictures and send those as messages (though the G1's camera didn't want to cooperate with me to send a non-blurry photo for an adequate test), access and reply to direct messages and even search search.twitter.com. By default, it automatically checks for new tweets every 3 minutes, though you can refresh that manually.

All in all, it is a solid first step for a Twitter client, and I look forward to playing with the first official release next week. A side note -- the actual mobile web interface for Twitter looks fantastic on Android's WebKit broswer. Readable, clean and very, very nice. While I still think a Twitter client is helpful for people who have lots of followers or want to manage more features, it is nice to know that the web interface is a step-up from the BlackBerry interface, anyway.


Check out the gallery for screenshots of Twitroid, it' pretty sexy.