Yahoo! Go Client (v3)
Yahoo and Nokia have a good relationship,
with a number of joint projects, so the continued support from Yahoo for their
mobile phone client, Yahoo! Go, is welcome. Easily downloaded and installed,
simply by pointing your smartphone browser at http://get.go.yahoo.com/,
the java application provides a single icon to click on for a number of Yahoo
services.
With a big warning on the download page that you ‘have to install this on the internal memory', the target audience (i.e. the non-Symbian geeks) might just wonder what to make of that - especially if they have an N81 or N95 8GB where, to their mind, all the storage is internal!
The big change with Yahoo! Go 3 is that their widgets engine has been ported into the client. These widgets allow access services outside of the Yahoo portfolio - currently there are widgets for MTV News and MySpace. Yahoo is looking to release an SDK at some point in February so other sites can join in the fun. Of course, at that point they're going to have to explain to their users how to install their widget into the Yahoo! Go system - and that'll be a lot of hoops to jump through.
Uptake on the widgets could well be vital to the success of Yahoo! Go but I have to say that adding them is slow, quite painful, and once there are more than a handful, the discovery problem that plagues any index system on a mobile screen is going to be evident.
The widgets are placed into the carousel, a 3d graphical ring of icons for each function. It's eerily reminiscent of the Nokia media launcher in the N95 if it was viewed edge on. While it looks great, it can be a touch slow in operation, and wastes a lot of screen estate in my opinion. But it is one of the few areas that designers can work on the graphics and make something look nice. Even more so, when you consider that everything else Yahoo! Go presents is in a browser-like 2d scrollable column of mostly text.
On first launching, all the services available to Yahoo! Go users are present in this carousel, namely Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, Local Search, Flickr, News, Weather, Finance, Sport and Entertainment, and this brings up the main point of Yahoo! Go. You need to be a heavy user of Yahoo! to get the full benefit of the application. You need to have everything set up, to be bouncing between the areas for full effect. Personally, I've got a Yahoo Mail account, but it's not used heavily, a Messenger account, and the social photo site Flickr. Deleting the unused areas speeds up the carousel to a useable speed - and from a user point of view, deleting unneeded icons is much easier than adding a new service.
Pizza results on Yahoo! Go
Being on mobile, one of the big possibilities is
searching 'where you are', and the OneSearch option in Yahoo! Go delivers this, although
in my tests not very well. It's unfortunate, given the capabilities of modern
phones to get a rough location from tower data, or an exact location from a built in GPS, that
the client makes no effort at all to look for these things, leaving you to
manually punch in your area. And when
you do (in my case "Leith, Edinburgh"
searching for "Pizza") the results aren't detailed enough.
Yahoo! Go returned three pizza results, all
over a mile away, all three being major commercial chains. For comparison,
Nokia's Maps (1.x) client pulled in close to twenty results, with more local
pizzerias alongside the nationals, and many of them a lot closer.
Pizza results on Nokia Maps
Other services to me just don't provide enough information. You get the top few entries, and some text, and then have to click through to the major story - while this light browse might be suitable for some, in this media rich age of online information, Yahoo! Go and what it delivered through the information channels left me distinctly underwhelmed.
But the fundamental question for me in all
this is "why", because every bit of the functionality of the applet is
duplicated online, in a mobile specific web site (http://beta.m.yahoo.com/). Okay, it misses
the graphically nice carousel, but (functionally) everything is there, including
the heavily hyped widgets. So when you boil the choice down to a rather slow
java client, or the 'already familiar interface' in the web browser, my gut
feeling is everyone is going to bias towards the web site - I know I am.
So it's technically competent, but
(unfortunately) like many Yahoo properties, it partially duplicates what's
already in the portfolio, with no clear reason for being there.
Ewan Spence, 26 Feb 2008
Published by Ewan Spence at 0:42 UTC, February 26th 2008
Categories: Applications
Platforms: Series 60
News Discussion
My wife is a Yahoo bod and she uses this client on her N81 and I have to admit that she can get to her email an awful lot quicker than I can, firing up my GMail app.
Tim
Although, wierdly, I've noticed that GMail does get slower with time. Maybe it starts caching stuff that then needs clearing out somehow? Anyone able to shed more light on GMail? And I *wish* they'd not a native S60 version...
Any way, a native S60 version of the Gmail app is long overdue, the existing version does - sometimes - take a frustratingly long time to start, and I am at the point of using POP/IMAP with my Google mail account and the built in Nokia email app.
Or, for that matter with Yahoo, why not use their pop3 delivery, again to the regular phone email application?
Advantages:
- Faster
- Integrated with phone contacts
- All email in one place
- Offline support for use on the tube where "live" email applets don't work
etc.
if
The other day I was in the pub and needed to look up a contact. I started the Gmail app (which admittedly takes a little while, as we've been saying) then went to contacts and found out the number. These numbers are also live so clicking them dials for you. Now, yes, there was no WLAN so I had to use 3G but it was fast, very cheap or free depending on contract, and didn't need the clunk of goosync's Contact's so-called synchronisation. (Unlike Steve L I think that goosync's workaround for Contacts is pretty unusable - but that's another gripe for another day!)
Tim
Yes, maybe GMail takes longer as time goes on because it's caching email details loaded in the previous session. And as time goes on, it has to parse these in, as well as grab the new email details? Just a guess!
concerning gmail, i switched to a S60 natively applications : Profimal handles my more than 7 thousand gmails email via imap without too many problems, is quite fast, and allows a wide range of face font to be used, allowing to read more than 15lines of text on the screen.
that simple, i wish they would make a database client with the same interface (their mp3 system is not too bad, as is the included image viewer)
I think the most significant thing about Go 3.0 are the Widgets. Not because the current ones are all that great but because it offers mobile web developers and bloggers easy entry to the high traffic Yahoo mobile portal. It's quite easy to create a Widget or Snippet showcasing your most recent posts or other content with links back to your own mobile site.
I do have to disagree about the mapping function in the Go 3.0 application. I like it. On my N95-3, Go does use the phone's GPS receiver to locate me and, unlike Google's mobile map application, Go shows the direction I'm moving with a little arrow. It's sensitive enough to point the right direction when I walk across my living room! The turn by turn directions are good too.
The first reviewer is right too Y!G does recognize the phone accurately and displays a cute message and then refuses to install.
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