There's been a lot of high-profile squabbling between tech giants Google and Microsoft lately over the Windows Phone YouTube app. To me, there are a couple of good reasons to keep calm and carry on in the midst of all this: First, you can do nearly everything YouTube on a Windows Phone's Internet Explorer browser by simply navigating to YouTube.com—view top popular videos, comment, rate videos, see your subscriptions, and more. In fact, there's a little third-party YouTube app that does nothing but redirect to the video-sharing mobile website; it's a top free download with 5-star rave reviews in the Windows Phone store!

So what can you not do in the mobile YouTube site on a Windows Phone? You can't upload videos. But this too is not an inextricable hardship: You can still upload videos by emailing them to your YouTube upload email address from the mobile shown on your YouTube account page. And plenty of Windows Phone video apps let you upload to YouTube. I'd originally intended to review the excellent YouTube HD app, but that suffered the same unfortunate fate as the official YouTube app, with the search advertising behemoth blocking even the playing of videos. Luckily, a very similar app, TubePro, does it all, too (so shhhh! Don't tell Google).

Using YouTube HD

After downloading TubePro from the Windows Phone store to my Nokia Lumia 928, I wasn't required to create an account or sign into my YouTube account, but it's much more functional if you do sign in. When I did sign in, the Google sign-in page had me approve a "This app would like to Manage your YouTube account, similar to a Facebook or Twitter app authorization. The app does show ads on some pages, but you can buy the $1.29 SuperTube, which is just an ad-free version of TubePro.

Unlike a lot of YouTube apps in the Windows Store, this one uses a real Windows Phone-style interface, with the expected tile and swiping navigation between app pages. Many of the other apps simply use Google's mobile video site. TubePro's gray tiles with large red icons let you navigate among Hot videos, your Subscriptions, your Favorites, and more.

Swiping to the right from the home screen shows you Top Rated videos broken down into subcategories. Another right swipe takes you to your subscriptions, and at the bottom is a search button in the form of a magnifying glass. One cool-seeming option was Map Tube, which shows a map with options for view count, and time ranges, but I didn't see any data on the map.

Watching a Video
Once you've tapped on a particular video either on Hot, Top, or from your subscriptions, you'll see its Details page with a large thumbnail of the video's poster image, with the thumbs up and down icons, view count, user name, and description. Below the thumbnail, you get choices for LQ (low quality), HQ, and HD. But next to this is the really verboten item: Download. Buttons on the bottom let you add the video to your Watch Later list, favorite it, subscribe to its creator, and share it through email or social networks, or SMS—all the stuff you can do on YouTube itself.

Right-swiping form the video details page moves through pages for Related videos, Author's videos, and Comments. During playback, you can change the aspect ratio (from 16:9 to 4:3 and back), fullscreen, or skip ahead an back. There's also a scrubber that lets you jump ahead and back anywhere in the video you want and you can pinch on the screen to lower the volume or unpinch to raise it.

Uploading Video Shot on Your Windows Phone to YouTube

As I mentioned in the intro, uploading your own mobile videos is one of the only things you can't do simply by opening YouTube.com in Internet Explorer. TubePro makes both uploading from your camera roll and from video you shoot on the spot possible. Tap the "Recorded" tile on the home screen, and you'll see two icons at the bottom: a movie camera and and upload button.

Hitting the movie camera starts the camera view, with the same icon for starting recording. This was a little hit-or-miss with me; sometimes the screen just turned black for a while before the recording started. I wish I could start recording by tapping the screen, as I could in the default camera app. Speaking of that default app, I'd like to see a TubePro upload option added to that, as Vyclone and other apps do.

Once the timer started and I was filming, I could hit the Pause button, which let me directly upload the video to YouTube after entering a title for it. I would have like to have been able to choose the privacy level: My test upload was public.

After recording some video clips, the Recorded page is populated with a list of them, but oddly this doesn't show thumbnails, just a date.

Downloading

One thing that Google made Microsoft take out of its official YouTube app was the ability to download videos from the site. For now, anyway, this Tube Pro app doesn't suffer from that restriction. Just tap the Download link on any video's Details page, and you'll be taken to a black Downloading page with a progress bar showing percent downloaded. You can pause the download, and a setting lets you enable background downloading. Once the video's in your phone's storage, you can head to your My Download page from its home screen tile and watch it at your leisure, without the need for a data connection. 

Which Tube Is For You?
If you just what to watch the top YouTube videos or those you've subscribe to, the sites' mobile Web version is all you need. Tube Pro adds the useful abilities to upload videos right from your phone and to download videos for later viewing. It also offers a more Windows-Phone-characteristic interface than the mobile Web site. Despite a few minor drawbacks like finicky video recording and not-too-obtrusive ads, I can recommend Tube Pro as a decent YouTube experience for Windows Phone users—at least until the almighty Google decides to cut it off, too.