Via TechCrunch:

If you’ve got a phone with an HTML5 compliant browser, you’ll probably want to check out YouTube’s new mobile site, which is rolling out over the next few hours at m.youtube.com. It’s a major upgrade from the old mobile web app, with a more polished UI and better load times. It also uses plenty of HTML5 features, including the video tag. But most important is the fact that the web app has superior video quality when compared to native applications — namely the iPhone’s — and it will soon feature more content as well. It’s also widely available, with support for nearly any HTML5 compliant mobile browser, including those on the iPhone and Android devices.

Of course, YouTube already has a mobile application with massive install base — every iOS device, all 100 million of them, came with a native YouTube application. But during a presentation at YouTube’s headquarters today, product manager Andrey Doronichev made it clear that the new web-based application is superior in just about every way, and it wasn’t hard to detect some tension between YouTube and Apple. This underscores a bigger trend, as Google shifts toward favoring web applications over native apps whenever it can.

So what do you think is in store for widely-used “utilities” like YouTube? Will the trends of browser-based solutions continue? Or does a native app offer too many advantages in most scenarios?

Video after the break ….