By Julian Prokaza on Tuesday, 11 March 2008
 After launching in the US in January, Yahoo has now made the beta version of its Go 3.0 mobile portal application available to European users. Intended as an all-in-one application for everything Yahoo related, the portal has had a full cosmetic makeover to make it much more suitable for small handheld screens. Like Yahoo’s desktop application, Go 3.0 also supports widgets – plug-ins that add new features and services.
Mobile portals may evoke the dreary old days of WAP, but since few mobile browsers are as capable as those on the desktop, it makes a certain amount of sense to combine a range of services into a single, easy-to-access, starting point.
Google offers something similar with the mobile versions of its various services, but these are wholly web-based. This may make Gmail, Google Reader and the rest platform independent (to some extent), but Google doesn’t play nicely with some handheld web browsers – Opera being a case in point.
Yahoo Go 3.0, on the other hand, is a Java application that you need to download and install – just go to get.go.yahoo.com in your handset’s browser. You obviously need a phone that supports Java to make use of Go, and support is currently limited to Nokia, Sony Ericsson and BlackBerry handsets at the moment. Windows Mobile support is due, but users are stuck with Yahoo Go 2.0 until that time.
Go 3.0 is a 732Kb download on a Sony Ericsson K800i – our test handset – and it ran pretty snappily once installed. The application takes the form of an icon-driven carousel, accessed with whatever passes for a control pad on your handheld.
By default, the carousel has widgets for Yahoo email, Flickr, the latest news (current affairs, sport, financial and entertainment), local weather and local information (based on what you’ve set your current location to).
The news pages have plenty of scope for tweaking if you’re not happy with the default settings. News proper is based on standard RSS feeds, but you can also create keyword-driven ‘watchlists’ that Yahoo uses to periodically search (based on your preferences) both its own services and pertinent websites.
A ‘Watchmen’ watchlist, for example, pulled up top-level information about the forthcoming film, various images from the comic, and various standard and mobile websites, plus filtered links to Flickr photos, related Wikipedia pages, questions on Yahoo Answers and nearby businesses (obviously nothing relevant in this instance, but still). Clever stuff, and much quicker than ploughing through a list of search engine results.
The Sport, Entertainment and Finance widgets work in much the same way and have similar options, and Weather holds no surprises. The Flickr widget offers a neat way to manage your photo-sharing account – you can upload photos more easily than by emailing them individually, as well as browse both your own and others’ Flickr albums.
Access to live map data with route-finding is invaluable on a mobile phone -- that’s just what the Maps widget offers. Like Google Maps, this shows map, satellite or hybrid views of a location – either chosen manually or via a ‘positioning’ feature that can pinpoint your location via GPS (if available) or nearby mobile phone masts. Alas, this faux-GPS refused to work on a Nokia E65 and the traffic map view wouldn’t display anything either. Nevertheless, the maps are extremely clear and are perfectly legible on a small mobile phone screen.
Maps also offers a city guide that pulls pertinent images from Flickr and provides links for pages showing places to eat, stay, visit and so on, and each entry links back to the map for directions. It all slots together quite neatly and again, it’s really useful to have such information easily accessible from your mobile phone.
Yahoo Go 3.0’s only real limitations are that it won’t access email accounts other than Yahoo’s and the widget gallery is currently pretty meagre. Still, Go's default functions are so extensive that the lack of the latter aren’t really an issue.
If you’ve yet to get online with your mobile phone, Yahoo Go 3.0 should be the application that tempts you to try out your data tariff. Power users will find it works best alongside a browser like Opera Mini (the built-in web browser is pretty poor), but it’ll be more than an adequate replacement for the kind of information most people need access to on their mobiles.
Yahoo! Go 3.0
| Price |
Free |
| Rating |
6 out of 6 |
| Good |
Tailor-made for mobiles; easy to use; great out-of-the-box features; |
| Bad |
Can only read Yahoo mail; not many third-party widgets |
| Verdict |
An invaluable add-on for any mobile phone that makes the mobile internet much more accessible |
| Manufacturer |
Yahoo |
| Install from |
Yahoo Go |
Specifications
| Minimum requirements |
Java-compatible handset with internet access. v3.0 compatibility currently limited -- more details here. |
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