First impressions of Yahoo! Go

This week,
Yahoo launched its Yahoo! Go service that brings the Y! Messenger and the Yahoo
web based desktop including eMail, calendar, address book and notes to (Nokia)
S60 mobile phones. The Yahoo website does not give a lot of details of how the
application works and what it does, so I’ll fill the gap with what I’ve found
out while playing around with it on two phones in the past days.

The application is quite big with its 2 MB installation file.
2 MB phone memory and 8 MB on the memory card are required. It looks like the 2
MB phone memory are just required to be able to download and install the
application. Afterwards, most of the application is stored on the external
memory card.

Even though
the application is quite big it uses the already installed calendar, address
book, notes, and web browser. I like this approach very much as I don’t want
two calendars, etc. on my phone. I like the native phone applications
especially the calendar combined with the Active Desktop that shows upcoming
calendar entries of the day on the Idle screen of the phone. That’s a real
killer criteria for me so I am glad I can continue to use this!

When the
program is installed, all entries of the calendar, phone book, etc. are
synchronized to your Yahoo web based organizer. The application uses GPRS/UMTS
for this so make sure you know how much your operator charges you for data. The
amount of data transferred is very small (after the first synchronization just
a couple of kb per synch) so that should not be a problem.
Once
synchronized, all calendar entries, address book entries and notes are
available both on the phone and on the MyYahoo web page. The phone can be set
to synchronize automatically with Yahoo’s server via a GPRS/UMTS connection or
manually by the user. I’ve set it to manual as I often travel abroad were
packet calls are charged ridiculously high… Synchronization just takes a
couple of seconds.

First
installation is somewhat tricky. The mobile sends out an SMS to a U.K. based phone number and waits for a
reply. The reply never came when I tried it the first time. When I tried the
next day, it worked but it took over 5 minutes for the response SMS to arrive.
This needs to change as most users (including me) are not comfortable waiting
so long and will abort and retry the process. For some like Debi Jones  in the U.S. it didn’t work at all despite Yahoo claiming support for both her
network and her mobile phone. Well, looks like this is the weak spot of the
application.

Multiple
Device Support: Yahoo! Go supports multiple phones simultaneously! Changes made
on any device or on the web are synchronized to all other devices. The different phones can even be switched on at the same time.

There’s
lots more functionality in the package that still needs to be explored. The
Yahoo Messenger has to be mentioned in here, as Christian Lindhom has not promised too much when he said in his blog that the Messenger
Application is stunning. It just looks like the Yahoo Messenger on the desktop,
just smaller. One can even send pictures from the Gallery to other people. The
application downsizes the picture so it can be sent quickly with a reasonable
picture quality. The messenger also offers the option to take a picture with
the internal camera. A great feature especially with UMTS were you can be on
the phone and send a picture simultaneously.

The first
version of the program is already very powerful and nicely integrated both with
phone applications and the Yahoo back office. People have already come up with
good suggestions for future versions like in comments to Russel Beattie’s blog. 

Martin