I’m sure anyone reading this is familiar with YouTube at this point. It’s that place where 10% of people want to be your BFF, while the other 90% just want to tell you that they think you suck.

As YouTube’s popularity soars to seemingly endless heights, so does the demand for a portable version. In June of this year, the browser based m.youtube.com was launched to satiate these demands. The people rejoiced. Finally, we can watch others embarrass themselves while on the go! The fun came to a quick halt when people realized there were only about 13 videos available, most of them being made of lame.

So, the quest for the portable YouTube experience began. A handful of companies threw their cards on the table, but none of them really nailed it. Each was missing something. Be it the video collection sucked, the UI was shoddy, or the community features were just completely missing.. none of them brought everything YouTube could offer through the official site.

Youtube Mobile is Helio’s swing at packaging up the entire YouTube experience in one application, and costs the always awesome price of free.

One of the most crucial aspects of any Youtube application is the video selection. Without access to YouTube’s gimongous collection of videos, what’s the point? Fortunately, YouTube Mobile has access to a ridiculous amount of content at launch. While it’s not quite complete yet, it’s damn close. It took a bit of digging to find anything we wanted to watch that wasn’t there. It seems that about 90% of the catalog is already online and ready to stream. Your dreams to rickroll people while in line at the movies can finally come true!

Helio wasn’t the first to reach the market with a solid YouTube application. Apple’s iPhone/iTouch application made it out the doors a while back, featuring a massive video catalog. Unfortunately, that’s about where Apple’s offerings ended. What YouTube Mobile lacks in punctuality, it makes up in its feature set. It really seems like you can do anything from YouTube Mobile that you could on the full blown version.

Unlike competing products, Comment posting (”Let me tell you why I don’t like your hat.”), Video Responses (”Let me show you why I don’t like your hat.), subscriptions (”I’m going to stalk you and your hat.”), and other community based features are not only possible, but ridiculously easy. Load up a video, hit a soft key, and take your pick.

Speaking of loading videos: In our initial testing, it only takes about 10-20 seconds to load a video on a 3G connection. Video playback is good. From the videos I’ve watched, the quality is on par with most 3G2 streams. Don’t expect HDDVDs to rocket out of your Ocean, but the quality is more than acceptable.

Of course, it’s not Youtube without the ability to upload your own videos. Even that is absurdly simple. No short codes or hacky e-mail methods required here. You can respond to videos, shoot entirely new ones, or upload one already stored on your device with 2 or 3 clicks within the application itself. Once you’re done filming, you get all the standard choices (Name, Description, Privacy, etc.), but also the option to Geotag your shot with GPS coordinates. Shoddy signal freaked out the video uploading process the first time we tried it, but it worked perfectly once we were back in the delicious cell-signal packed walls of society.

They managed to pack a ton of features into the user interface without cluttering it up. YouTube is all about the videos, and the application focuses on that. Neat little design touches such as the ability to quickly hop between tabs with the 1/2/3 keys make it feel properly polished.

The only dislikes I could find with the app required grasping at straws to the point that I hesitated in writing them into this review: For purposes of intuitive design, I feel the volume control mapping on the directional pad should have been switched to left/right rather than up/down in order to match the on screen visuals, and the function currently mapped to up/down should have just been taken off the directional pad all together. Accidentally pressing it brings up another menu, which halts playback and requires the video to rebuffer. Yep, that’s it.

All in all, There is nearly nothing I disliked about this application and a whole lot that I friggin’ love. It really does pack everything YouTube has to offer into one gorgeous little package. It manages to match the competition in nearly every field, while blowing them out of the water by providing all of the community features that the others don’t.