Yahoo's Mobile Web Makeover
Yahoo's completely redesigned mobile hub on the Web is a tall, scrollable mashup of search, news, e-mail, social networking, finance, weather, sports scores, and any other RSS feed you'd want to add.
Yahoo's completely redesigned mobile hub on the Web is a tall, scrollable mashup of search, news, e-mail, social networking, finance, weather, sports scores, and any other RSS feed you'd want to add.
At the very top is Yahoo OneSearch, which keys in your location using GPS or cell tower triangulation to make your text searches start faster. Below the search bar is a condensed feature section that emphasizes images.
Below that is an option to expand all Yahoo services, which gives you a portal-style list of everything from the Yahoo calendar to Flickr, to movie show times. Back in the main screen, Yahoo OneConnect lets you add Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, and AOL e-mail in-boxes, Facebook and Twitter feeds, instant messengers, and Yahoo's calendar and address book.
The area for Yahoo OnePlace will let you monitor RSS feeds for weather, finance, stocks, bookmarks, sports scores, and any other RSS link you'd like to add. Now here's the bad part. Yahoo Mobile is infinitely customizable, which means that it's infinitely scrollable--the more services you add, the taller the app. While this is less of a problem on the iPhone, whose finger-flicking navigation rapidly scrolls up and down, it will take more time (and patience) on other devices.
The ability to flip between screens for these various functions makes the iPhone app smoother and less cluttered, though the individual pages can still get long if you add numerous RSS feeds.
Yahoo's new native application for Java phones may be the same genus as the Web portal, but it's a completely different beast. Yahoo Mobile for smartphones has a few more enhancements, including voice search and an underlying Opera Mini browser.
The app will take on a dashboard feel, with the search bar on top and
widgets tiled below. The widgets will include services like Facebook
and a socially intelligent address book that integrates e-mail history,
SMS, IM, and calling. There will also be a mapping app, and plenty of
ways to personalize by adding your own widgets.
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