Joost released a new iPhone appli­ca­tion that, at first, seems like a pretty cool idea. You can use it to stream any of the videos hosted on Joost to the iPhone and watch them wher­ever you are. Neat! Movies and TV shows on the go! Pre­mium con­tent, because you can only watch that cat rid­ing a Roomba on YouTube so many times.

Well, not so fast.

Like seem­ingly every­thing else about the iPhone, there’s a fatal flaw or two that makes the whole thing kind of WTF. Like you can’t use it over cel­lu­lar data. At all. Nada. WiFi only, so no watch­ing on the bus or the train, but more to the point, let’s think about this. You can only watch it at a hotspot. Mean­ing some­where where you’re sta­tion­ary, prob­a­bly sit­ting down. Maybe enjoy­ing a yummy cof­fee bean ori­ented beverage.

Where you could just pull out your damn laptop.

Is any­one really going to try to tell me that watch­ing videos on the 3.5 inch, 320×480 screen on an iPhone is a bet­ter expe­ri­ence than watch­ing them on even a 9 inch net­book? Really?

So while this is a nice idea, it thor­oughly misses the point. It can’t see the point. The point is, well, a speck.

Con­trast this to Win­dows Mobile. Install the free proxy browser Sky­fire, and just about any Win­dows Mobile device can watch stream­ing video from Joost, Hulu or, well, any­where. And you can do it over cel­lu­lar. On a train. Where maybe a net­book wouldn’t be as convenient.

Unlike other mobile browsers, Sky­fire sup­ports the desk­top ver­sion of Adobe Flash appli­ca­tions so sites, includ­ing those that serve-​up video and music, are ren­dered exactly as you would expect — just like your PC. You will instantly rec­og­nize the con­tent, be famil­iar with the page lay­out — which is not true for most mobile brows­ing expe­ri­ences. We sup­port all that’s good about today’s web — not just Flash, but also Sil­verlight, Ajax, Quick­Time and more. And even bet­ter: Sky­fire evolves with the newest capa­bil­i­ties with­out you hav­ing to do anything.

Yeah, I thought so.