I decided to take Yahoo Go 2.0 for a spin. I previously installed version 1.0 last year and wasn’t terribly impressed. This version offers more features, accoutrements and tighter integration to other Yahoo services. Most notably, I like the Flickr integration. My test platform was the Motorola Q running on the Verizon’s EDVO network. The cab installer downloaded and installed without problems on this Windows Mobile device. At first launch, the UI was coherent and pleasant to look at. However, the eye candy wore off pretty fast. The apps were slow and at times a bit clunky. In the following paragraphs, I will comment on some of the widgets.
Mail is the most stable and most responsive widget. I actually like this version of Yahoo over the mobile WAP version. Attachments are not supported in this widget.
Flickr is my favorite widget in the entire suite. You can add comments, upload photos and search. Overall, Flickr works great on Yahoo Go 2.0. It browsed my entire device including the removable miniSD card. I was able to upload a file, tag it, and give a description in one shot.
Besides Flickr and Yahoo Mail, I wasn’t impressed with anything else.Yahoo Maps was slow and crashed a few times. Compared to Google Maps, it failed to find specific POIs (Points of Interests). The routing was very slow and unintuitive. Google Maps on the iPhone running EDGE was several times more responsive than Yahoo Maps running on Verizon’s EDVO. When I tried to do a search for an intersection “Van Ness and Geary” in San Francisco, Yahoo Maps would return nothing. Google Maps would always find an intersection.
The most important widget is the Yahoo oneSearch engine. It simplifies searches into categories such as Movies, Products, City, Companies/Finance, News, Celebrities (if you’re into Hollywood gossip) and the web.
Like Google mobile on a WAP phone, Yahoo Go attempts to reformat web pages for the small screen. The results are often time disastrous. On a Windows Mobile device, Yahoo Go should use PIE to render the pages. Here is an example of how Ebay Motors and Craigslist appear in Yahoo Go 2.0.
In conclusion, I wanted to like Yahoo Go 2.0 but was a bit disappointed with the slowness and sluggishness. It felt like a really slow Java midlet instead of a native WM application.At times, I would whip out my iPhone just to get something done while Yahoo Go would process an event.
Rumor has it that there will be an iPhone version coming soon. Yahoo should simply make an AJAX web version so it can run on the iPhone, Symbian S60 and newer mobile devices that support rich Web 2.0 capabilities.
You can find out more about Yahoo Go 2.0 at http://mobile.yahoo.com/go/
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