YouTube has finally given its mobile site a complete redesign. The old YouTube mobile was designed for the janky old browsers that came bundled with the likes of the Motorola RAZR, but those phones are ancient history. The new site sports a touch-friendly design, faster speeds, and video playback that is compatible with all devices.

Though YouTube notes that the new site is meant to target all manner of phones, it's also clear that the company thinks iPhone users should consider making the switch away from the native YouTube app. There are surely a number of reasons why: it's easier for YouTube to maintain one, good mobile site than try to develop native apps for every platform, and it's hard to issue updates to the iPhone app through Apple since it comes built-in with the OS. Also, it's no secret that Apple and Google have a strained relationship as of late, and YouTube may be trying to distance itself by taking back control of how iPhone users interact with the site.

We decided to take a look at the mobile site and see how it compares to the native app on iOS 4. Though the overall functionality is the same, there are areas where the new mobile UI excels.

YouTube Mobile can be accessed by going to m.youtube.com on your phone. After signing in, you get access to all the same things you can access on the normal site or on the native iPhone app, including subscriptions, favorites, playlists, your own videos, and more. I'm fond of the new dashboard created just for the mobile site. It puts everything I would want to do (including a search box at the top) on a single page in a touch-friendly UI:

The nice thing about the mobile dashboard is that the icons rearrange to fill your screen if you're viewing in landscape mode, too:

Things like favorites and your videos more or less display similarly between the mobile site and the iPhone app; when you navigate to those sections, they're shown in list form:

YouTube Mobile on the left, iPhone app on the right

The real differences begin to show up when you go to view a video. Unlike the native iPhone app, the mobile site sports all of the latest UI changes that YouTube has made to its normal site. This includes the ability to like or dislike videos with thumbs up/down buttons; a "Save To" button for you to put a video in your favorites, a queue, or a playlist; and a way to share videos with friends. There's also a button, "HQ," that lets you toggle between a higher-quality video and lower-quality one. And this is all on the same page as the video itself.

In the native app, you must watch the video on its own and perform all of these actions on another screen, and none of these new options are available. The only thing you can do from the app is rate or comment, which again happens on a separate screen. Additionally, YouTube has done away with the star rating system on its site. The app is clearly an outdated version of YouTube, and I much prefer the layout of the mobile site.

Even on a mediocre data connection, the mobile site is fast and works just as well as the native app ever would in the same situation—if not better, because you can control the quality of the video. The problem, at least for iPhone users, is that the mobile site will never be the default option for when you tap on a YouTube video elsewhere on the Internet. When navigating through some Ars articles with YouTube videos embedded, tapping on them still took me to the video within the native app itself. This will pretty much always be the case as long as the native app is there and un-deletable (since it's one of the default apps from Apple). Users of other mobile devices likely won't have this same issue.

Based on my brief time comparing the two, I definitely prefer the mobile app over the native app, even though I would like it to be native. Given the iPhone's default behavior, though, it's likely that I'll keep using the native app simply because that's what the phone wants to do, and I can't change it. For browsing and showing friends random videos while out, however, the mobile site is top-notch.

Oh, you'd like me to add a bookmark? Perhaps I can stick it next to the native app icon on my home screen.

There's one more element to the mobile site that raises an eyebrow, though: the fact that it prompts me to save a bookmark (which can then put an icon on my home screen, if I so choose). Since the site is designed for many different mobile devices, it clearly detects that I'm using an iPhone and points me to the icon I should be tapping if I want to give it its own spot among my apps. Some believe this indicates that Google is moving away from its native app on the iPhone, and I have to agree. When the native app is already outdated, why bother dealing with it when you could create a similar (if not superior) experience using HTML5 goodness?