Download Squad

In a grand movement to take over the mobile search application space, Yahoo! recently launched Yahoo! Go 2.0 Beta. This slick new mobile application download allows users with a Yahoo account to quickly and conveniently connect to email, news, and photos. Yahoo! has pushed other all in one mobile applications to the side with this solution. Google's Gmail mobile is great to work with because of the minimal elements, but I was shocked at the ease of use and intuitive features the Go 2.0 beta has. The 597kb download took a few lengthy minutes to install on my Blackberry (might have been shorter, but I have to admit, I was getting a little impatient with the progress bar), and was set up in no time. Keep in mind that there are only certain phones that the Yahoo! Go 2.0 will support, with the full service provider and phone model list on the Go 2.0 website. Also, data charges will also apply for this service, and there really is no way to see how much data your are chewing through, but given the extreme use of imagery you can bet it's quite a bit. When the application was launched, it gave me what Yahoo has coined, a menu "carousel", filled with a widgetized menu system on the right, and the content displaying on the left side. (This might be different depending on your phone model. Some phones have the menu displayed along the bottom.)

When you choose a section from the carousel, the content area populates with your chosen data, targeted towards the location you have specified in your Yahoo! account when you signed up back in the day. The widgetized carousel list consists of One Search to search for anything online, including images and movie showtimes. You can view maps, city guides, traffic details and local happenings with Local and Maps. Yahoo emails can be pulled in with an easy to use and synced Yahoo! email inbox with all of your regular CC, BCC, Reply to all functions. Personal news feeds can be created to get the news you want when it happens. Sporting teams with sports headlines and tickers can be tracked. There is also a finance watchlist, market summaries, and financial news feeds straight from Yahoo's highly rated financial data service. You can get your Celebrity and entertainment gossip instantly. Weather can be checked out complete with pretty weather condition icons and forecast outlooks. Again, this is synced with your city profile so the weather for your area will show up instantly. As for images, Yahoo has integrated your Flickr account into the mix, making it easier to thumb through and show off your pictures while on the go. You can also search and connect with other photos in the Flickr database.

This is a nice big step by the Yahoo! team to boost up user interaction with their products in the mobile environment. Will Google and MSN bite back? If they do, they have some work ahead of them. Yahoo! really seems to have risen to the top with this clean and easy to use mobile application.