Babelgum Entertains, but Up to a Point

Babelgum, by Babelgum, is the latest free video player to hit the spotlight. Babelgum gives you access to thousands (I’m going by what the company says in its app description) of videos from around the world.

Sounds good, so I give the icon a tap from my iPhone’s Home Screen. First time out, Babelgum crashed.

The launch screen displays several highlight clips, stacked like a messy deck of cards. I can shake the iPhone and mix them up, or I can merely tap the List icon in the upper right corner.

I decide to watch a 3m 26s video clip of Lily Allen, The Fear (Clean) that is highly rated by most people and if I really want to, I can add it to a list of favorites in Babelgum or share it with my friends on Facebook or MySpace. I know all these things because a screen that pops up after tapping Lily’s highlight clip tells me so.

I decide to first share the video clip with one of my daughters, just to prove that I’m not entirely a doddering old fool, ready to be fitted for diapers. Big mistake. Safari just popped open, and although I really would like to share that clip, I don’t like the idea stepping through a bunch of Web pages to do it, which can be a snooze on an early Friday morning.

Sigh, I quit Safari, go back to my Home Screen on my iPhone and relaunch Babelgum. I tap Lily Allen again, and when the same screen appears, I ignore the Share icon. I also ignore the Email icon because I can guess what comes next. Instead, I tap the play button and finally, Lily Allen. Gosh, she’s cute. If I only were 99 years younger…

I like the tune, I like the video, and I agree it’s worth the four stars the clip has received. If I register with Babelgum and log in, I can rate the video too. Alas, I’m a bit tired for that just now. Maybe later.

I tap Cancel and go back to the launch screen. Let’s see, what else do we have? Along the bottom menu are Most Viewed, Favorites, Search and Channels icons. I can figure those out without even looking, but I do want to see what’s available under the Channels icon so I give it a poke. So, now I’m looking at a list of, well, Channels, such as Comedy, Our Earth, Underwater and Vote! Animation. I choose the latter channel, select a video (they’re not animations) and Babelgum crashes again.

Okay, so I get it.

Babelgum is similar to the popular Joost — a collection of downloadable videos — which I reviewed a while ago. I predicted then that we would be seeing more of these vid-apps with ad-support, which took zero imagination to figure out. Despite it’s glitches, I found Babelgum mildy entertaining but the content is somewhat limited. Babelgum won’t live on my iPhone for long.