Updated: Yahoo!, after a long silence has announced an upgrade to its Yahoo! Go for Mobile 2.0 offering – the company will now support many Windows Mobile phones and has also signed up Windows Mobile device maker, HTC as a partner.
The Windows Mobile support adds about 75 new devices to the portfolio of phones that support Yahoo! Go. For folks who are using Yahoo email as their main email account, the ability to stay seamlessly connected and synced wireless could be very attractive. Sort of like cut-price Blackberry experience! Unfortunately, I could not do the review because the service is not exactly live. I tried to download it on a T-Mobile Dash, and we got a coming soon message. Apparently Smart Phones are not supported but regular Windows Mobile phone users can download it, which is again a problem since I don’t have a WM phone.
That is mildly annoying, making some of us nosey parkers wonder what was the urgency to issue the press release. Is this an attempt to put a good face on the fact that some of the senior members of Yahoo mobile group are leaving for greener pastures? Thad White, and Irv Henderson are two we know about, and there are more.
Okay, we are looking for shapes in shadows, so back to the announcement. As part of the deal with HTC, Yahoo! Services – Yahoo! Go for Mobile 2.0, Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! oneSearch will be preloaded in the HTC devices. Yahoo had announced Yahoo2Go 2.0 about two months ago. The last upgrade to the Yahoo! Go service added Blackberry support and brought into fold the then popular Motorola RAZR phones. The company has deals with four of the five major wireless handset makers for Yahoo! Go service. The only holdout it seems is Sony Ericsson.
Nice to know that Yahoo has finally updated Yahoo! Go for Mobile 2.0.
Does Yahoo! Go work properly with the new 3G RAZR from Cingular? When I attempted to install (for instance) GMaps on one of the demo units at a Cing store in Mountain View, it asked to make a connection literally every time it transmitted or received a chunk of data. Unless there’s some model for trusted apps to get unlimited network access (which is probably the point, with a hefty fee for that trust authentication), I don’t see J2ME apps being viable on that phone…which is a shame, because Y!Go has the look of something that could be a cheap and easy substitute for a lot of what the iPhone is meant to do…
Not sure Jon. I don’t use Motorola phones, thanks to their ultra crappy UI.
The problem might be with the phone locked to the Cingular network, which has some peculiarities.
More interesting would be to see OneSearch being integrated with Opera Mini further.
Too bad they aren’t yet supporting EXISTING HTC phones though, or at least not my 8125. Disappointing to see an HTC press release but still no support.
you ought to play with Yahoo! go for S60 (mostly Nokia phones) already for year – just download .sis file from link at bottom of page and install it on S60 phone… It will sync Yahoo address book with your phone address book, and then continuously deliver mail in same Income folder where SMS-es usually coming, and also updating your inbox at their mail server upon deletion or read of mail on phone. I played with it recently and it works Ok so far.
This Just In From Yahoo PR:
The service will be available on T-Mobile Dash at the end of April/beginning of May.There are roughly 75 Windows Mobile supported phones today and right now Yahoo! is supporting about 1/3 of those, with that number increasing rapidly.
Yahoo! has been getting a lot of requests from Windows Mobile users asking when their phone will be supported, so Yahoo! wanted to get the release out to those users now, knowing that some would have to wait for the support.
You can use the service on a little over 100 phones today (cummulatively), including java and Windows mobile supported phones.
I’ve been checking the sms link everyday in eager anticipation, but nothing yet. I have been satisfied by the original YahooGO .cab file I have been using on my Dash, but the 2.0 looks so nice. Actually, the original YahooGO hogs the memory a bit and sometimes causes connection errors. I think it wants to fully control the data connection, but using it to sync just my address, calendar, mail, and photos is great.