I noticed this week that at some point Yahoo released a version of its Yahoo Go for Mobile 2.0 that works on my wife’s T-Mobile SDA phone (a version for my MDA is forthcoming, they tell me). Naturally, I downloaded it and checked it out, and I like what I see. First impressions:
- The interface is pretty smooth, with a scrolling icon bar along the bottom for various pages of features.
- You can sign in to your Yahoo account, but if you don’t, you get most of the important features, like weather and news by just choosing your location.
- The pages are:
- Y! home page, with Yahoo OneSearch, which shows results from many different sources based on your search query, as well as a link to a MyCity page (which shows the weather, events, traffic, local news, dining, lodging, maps, web sites, Flickr photos, web images, and theaters for your area), a list of popular searches, and scrolling tips.
- Local & Maps, which lets you search maps, view the city guide, view maps, links to a Getting Around page (with realtime traffic, directions, local maps and saved locations) and scrolling local events.
- News, with headlines and scrolling top searches.
- Sports, with headlines and scrolling sports scores.
- Finance, with headlines and scrolling stock quotes.
- Entertainment, with headlines and scrolling top movie searches.
- Weather, with today’s and tomorrow’s forecasts.
- Flickr, with interesting photos, and a place to sign and manage your Flickr account.
- Mail, which lets you sign in and manage your Yahoo Mail account.
- Most of the pages are ad-supported, and you can click on the ad for an offer.
- Loading of some sub-pages is kind of slow, even under a wi-fi connection.
- You can set it to automatically download all the needed info once ever 30 minutes or some other set interval.
I really enjoyed it, as it makes for a pretty good and slick dashboard for the phone. I can’t wait to see how it works on my MDA, which has a bigger and touch-sensitive screen, especially if it really takes advantage of the touch screen in the UI.
So, in terms of downloadables, Microsoft has the Windows Live Maps app, and Google has two apps, one for Google Maps and another for Gmail. Both do a really good job with Maps (one area that Yahoo’s program is underwhelming in), and the Gmail app is kind of annoying, but gets the job done. Meanwhile, here we have Yahoo kicking everyone’s ass with something that does everything, does it well, runs great, looks great, and makes me wonder if the others have plans to really compete with this.
Read more about Yahoo OneSearch, which you can access at m.yahoo.com on your phone without downloading anything, at PalmAddicts and the YSearchBlog.
