Yahoo Announces Yahoo Mobile Hoping To Revolutionize The Way We Interact With The Web On Our Mobile Devices
by
on February 17, 2009,
Today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Yahoo is making a big announcement: upcoming launch of Yahoo! Mobile. The company is known for its love to announce first and make things available after some time only and today is no exception: starting from today Yahoo! Mobile will be available in a limited beta testing and the public availability is scheduled for March and May depending on the devices.
Yahoo! Mobile is described as a starting point to the internet from a mobile device and is intended to bring all the services a typical web user most frequently uses on a mobile device - be it a cell phone or a smart phone - to one place created by Yahoo. The range of supported devices is quite significant as Yahoo! Mobile will be available as an application to owners of iPhone, Nokia, BlackBerry, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Motorola smart phones and it will also be accessible simply via a browser (it should be WebKit-based browser) on a mobile device - by pointing it to http://mobile.yahoo.com/.
Yahoo promises something revolutionary given how traditional everything made by Yahoo usually is: this time they claim they will change the way millions of mobile users around the world access the web on the go via their mobile devices by providing them with an open interface to customize according to the individual user’s needs and requirements.
The three major principles of Yahoo! Mobile are:
Discover - via location-aware search and hand-picked stories from Yahoo editors
Stay Connected - via direct access to email from the most popular providers (including Gmail, Hotmail, AOL Mail, and Yahoo! Mail, obviously), social networks (including Facebook, MySpace and even Twitter) as well as Yahoo’s own services like Messenger, Calendar, and Address Book
Stay Informed - by getting popular headlines from Yahoo! News and personalized news consumption solution Yahoo! onePlace
If you are willing to see if Yahoo has the potential to revolutionize the way you personally access the web, you can already try to enter the private beta or wait for late March when mobile web version and iPhone application are promised to be available to the general public or for late May when smart phone version will be available as well. On the website you can also subscribe to be notified of the launch.
Of course some of the services will be mostly useful to people who stick to their Yahoo accounts for email and contacts management but all in all it is good to see Yahoo trying to innovate in the field that is predicted to rule the web - mobile web. Of course we’ll have to wait for actual implementation to see how good Yahoo team is in developing mobile applications for the promised range of devices and to hear what users say about how revolutionary the experience is for them but for now I’m glad Yahoo has noticed mobile users and is willing to offer them something special.
