Why You Can Trust CNET Squrl for iOS review: A one-stop hub for videos from around the Web
Squrl lets you search and browse many of the Web's most popular video sites.
Squrl is a streaming-video player that lets you search and browse many of the Web's most popular video services, all from one place. The main dashboard offers a number of ways to quickly find interesting videos from around the Web, and even has a powerful engine for serving personalized recommendations. What's more, Squrl didn't degrade the video quality from its original sources, and playback seemed to be smooth without any glitches or freezes.
Squrl for iOS
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
While it's not required, we suggest connecting Squrl with your various social media accounts, like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Netflix, in order to get the most out of the app. By doing so, you essentially open up other channels that Squrl can sift through, which ultimately means more video access for you. Also, once you're connected, the app can take these sources into consideration when it comes up with recommendations for you to watch. Squrl looks at not only the content that you've consumed, but also what your connections on Facebook and Twitter have liked or shared, which make it a great source for good video recommendations.
When you first boot up Squrl, the thing you'll notice is its beautiful interface. The ample white space, sans-serif type, and single-color icons make for a refreshingly minimalist visual experience. Video thumbnails are sharply rendered, and navigating content is as easy as swiping vertically and horizontally. The global Search and Back buttons up top are nice touches, but there's one thing missing: a Home button. Without one, backing out of a deep browsing session can get tedious and involve several taps. That said, even without the Home button, we still enjoy zipping around Squrl's many different pages.
Of course, the best thing about Squrl is its wealth of content. It pulls from many of the most popular sources like Netflix, Hulu, Vimeo, YouTube, CollegeHumor, CNN, ESPN, and more. The Home screen lets you jump straight to recommended items, trending items, and featured items, and it lets you keep track of items you've watched, liked, or added to your queue. And then there's the all-important Channels screen. From here, you can see videos organized into categories, like Comedy, Entertainment, Music, and News, as well as less predictable channels like Cool Blogs, Twitter, and YouTube. You can also customize channels, so that you see videos only from the sources that you like. Whatever your interests are, there's a good chance Squrl has you covered. Squrl even includes a hand-curated selection of Live channels from sources like HuffPost Live, Al Jazeera, and the Home Shopping Network.
If you have friends who also use Squrl, you'll be able to keep tabs on them from the Activity page. If your friends opt in, you'll be able to see what they've watched, like, and even add some of their watched items to your queue. Likewise, you can opt in to broadcast your activity to them as well.
One useful feature in Squrl's iOS app is the capability to bring up controls while browsing through video listings. When viewing a list of videos from a favorite category, you can touch and hold on the video thumbnail to bring up tools for sharing, liking, adding to queue, and getting more information about the video. It's a minor interface feature, but makes for an elegant way to access the controls without a lot of digging through menus.
One thing we'd love to see added to Squrl is a favorite channels page. With so many different video sources available through the app, it can sometimes be annoying to have to navigate to the same ones all the time. For instance, instead of having to navigate to Reddit Videos through the Channels page and then through the Cool Blogs page, it would be nice if there were a shortcut somewhere for quicker access.
While it may not be perfect, Squrl is a fantastic app for watching and discovering new videos from around the Web. It comes with tools that let you customize what you want to watch, a queue for saving videos for later, social connectivity so you can share with friends, and powerful recommendations. If you're a big fan of Internet video, download Squrl onto your device now.