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Joost, a video-streaming service that was part of the Big Convergence of Media (“watching TV on your computer” to you and me) launched an iPhone/iPod touch app last year that frankly speaking, stank. It was buggy and crashed a lot, and the nicest thing you could say about the interface was that it was horrid.

Recently updated to version 1.1, the app has corrected many of the problems that plagued the first release, and while it’s still not the friendliest program in the world, it’s certainly far better than it was.

The app (available for free) allows you to watch both kinds of video: those featuring Britney and those featuring Beyonce. Sorry. You can browse through a large selection of films, TV shows, and music videos. The selection can seem a little eclectic; original Star Trek is nice to have (especially since they stopped smooshing it into letterbox format), Perfect Strangers is an odd choice, and if you want to watch anime, I hope you’re a fan of the rabidly-popular Naruto series, because they’ve got lots of it.

A big problem with v 1.0 was the page navigation. You’d flick the screen up and down to skim through a selection of about a dozen videos per page, but to navigate between pages you had to—carefully—drag your finger along a line just above the bottom menu bar. More than half the time this would result in me leaving the page I was on (usually Search) after accidentally hitting the “Browse” button which was just below the line. Version 1.1 fixes this by putting all the results for a category on one page, meaning you have more to search through at once, but at least you can stay on the page you want.

Another annoyance is that Joost is slow at buffering bigger files, even on a reliable, high speed wireless connection. While waiting for the original Trek episode “Space Seed” to load, the screen would often go black, then go to sleep. Shorter files, like the new Bruce Springsteen music video, loaded much quicker. Also, Joost lacks the ability to remember or “favorite” a video so that you can return to it later, or better yet, restarting from the point where you left it (like the iPod’s bookmark feature for audio books, or Netflix’s Watch Instantly). Leave Joost and it forgets everything. If you have to stop watching a movie part way through, you have to find it again (Joost does not remember searches).

While a definite step forward, Joost now feels like an application in the beta stage, rather than the alpha of 1.0. If you’ve got a wireless connection and are willing to pore through their odd collection of music videos, popular anime and public domain videos, hey, it’s free. But the user interface is still a version or two away from acceptability.

Product [Joost]