Helio today announced an enhanced YouTube application for the Helio Ocean handset, which integrates video capture and upload, GPS tagging and community features into a single application.

And the early reviews are positive.

"The application is quite good in general, but does still need a bit of work," writes MobileBurn's Michael Oryl. "For instance, it is not obvious as to how one gets back to the navigation tabs quickly from the video viewer (the 1, 2, and 3 keys jump to the tabs). The application tends to start rebuffer previous clips when the back button is hit. The quality of the videos on the YouTube Mobile app can't match that of the main website, and most clips require a fair amount of buffering before they start. But all in all, YouTube fans are going to be overjoyed with what the ocean can now do for them."

Gizmodo's Jason Chen agrees. "The video quality is definitely good, but not quite as good as iPhone over Wi-Fi," he writes. "The good news is that it loads faster and looks better than iPhone over EDGE. The interface is pretty solid, and allows you to scroll horizontally between featured videos and popular videos. The standard desktop options like favorites, commenting, playlists, related videos, rating and searching are also there. What makes this better than the iPhone is the ability to upload videos directly from your phone. How cool is it to shoot a camera vid, dump it onto YouTube, then call your friends to tell them about this crazy homeless guy you saw on the road? And speaking of roads, you can even GPS tag it with the Ocean's GPS so you know exactly where it is you were when you shot it."

More here from mocoNews.net ... more here from Engadget ... more here from SmartPhoneToday ... more here from WirelessWeek ... more here from InformationWeek ... more here from CNET News ... and the press release is here.