![\"Yahoo](\"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/images\/YahooMobile.jpg\" "\\"Yahoo")
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It looks like Yahoo is slowly replacing their legacy mobile web portal with the greatly enhanced\u00a0 one that they announced <\/a>at MWC and which I reviewed<\/a> a Beta of in April.\u00a0 According to a press release<\/a> issued today users with supported handsets in Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, Australia, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Spain and Italy should be seeing the updated site. The April Beta was launched in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Germany, France, India, Indonesia and the Philippines. Today’s additions bring the number of supported countries to 17.<\/p>\n Another change that I noticed is that when I go to yahoo.com<\/a> or m.yahho.com<\/a>,\u00a0 the new Yahoo Mobile appears instead of the legacy Yahoo portal.<\/p>\n The new Yahoo Mobile is a huge improvement over the old.\u00a0 Not only is it much more attractive, but it’s also highly customizable.\u00a0 Out of the box it includes OneSearch, “Today on Yahoo”,\u00a0 “a continually updated stream of the latest and most interesting stories” as well as a more in depth Yahoo News module with tabs for National, World,\u00a0 Sports and Entertainment News.\u00a0 There are placeholder modules urging users to add Weather, Stocks, My Yahoo, Bookmarks, Sports Scores, RSS Feeds, Yahoo\u00a0 IM, email from Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail<\/strong><\/em> or AOL Mail <\/strong><\/em>and Yahoo’s mobile\u00a0Pi\u00e8ce de r\u00e9sistance<\/strong>; “Social Pulse<\/span>” which displays live status updates from your Flickr, Twitter, Bebo, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Last.fm, Dopplr<\/strong><\/em> and Friendster <\/strong>feeds.<\/p>\n Most of the Beta glitches and general buginess, that I mentioned in April seem to be gone. However I experienced a new one today; my Twitter feed stopped updating May 20th! Removing Twitter from Social Pulse and putting it back\u00a0 got\u00a0 it working again<\/p>\n The press release mentions support for 100 additional devices, bringing the total to 400. If that sounds like a lot, consider that there are over 4500 different handset models with mobile web access.\u00a0\u00a0 It looks like Yahoo Mobile currently supports most Windows Mobile and S60 3rd edition phones, BlackBerries with OS 4.5 or later, the iPhone,\u00a0 all versions of Opera Mini, Opera Mobile 9.5\u00a0 and a few feature phones with the Teleca Obigio browser.\u00a0 Visitors to new.m.yahoo.com<\/a> with older BlackBerries, Nokia S40 devices and phones with the Openwave , Motorola MIB, Netfront and Opera Mobile 8.65 browsers will see;<\/p>\n We are sorry! Your phone does not (yet) support the new Yahoo! homepage. Please check back later. I even got the unsupported message with my new Google Ion Android phone,<\/strong> a high-end device if\u00a0 ever there was one. That has got to be a bug in Yahoo’s device detection logic as Android phones have been specifically mentioned by Yahoo in previous announcements as supported. I’ve reported the issue to Yahoo.<\/p>\n I gave Google a hard time<\/a> about supporting only high end devices with the new mobile iGoogle and I’m going to do the same with Yahoo.\u00a0 I applaud efforts to deliver a superior browsing experience to advanced mobile phone browsers. and am pleased with the speed of the Yahoo Mobile roll-out. \u00a0 The new Yahoo Mobile looks and for the most part works great on my Nokia N95 and in Opera Mini 4.2.<\/p>\n However Yahoo needs to extend support to most phones. According to AdMob (PDF)<\/a>, smartphones made up about 12% of all web capable devices sold worldwide in 2008 and accounted\u00a0 for about 35% of AdMob’s ad requests\u00a0 in April 2009. In the developing world, S40 and similar low-end WAP2 devices are going to be around for a long time. When you strip away the eye candy Yahoo Mobile is just a web page. There is nothing that it does functionally that could not be done with a simple one-size-fits-all xhtml-mp markup.\u00a0 Yahoo is under a lot of competitive pressure\u00a0 in the mobile space lately.\u00a0 Last month they killed all mobile application development<\/a>, except for\u00a0 iPhone apps, to concentrate their efforts on web based mobile services. I think that is a smart move, providing Yahoo leverages the web’s advantage as the universal mobile platform<\/strong>.\u00a0 To differentiate itself and grow Yahoo needs to rapidly extend\u00a0 Social Pulse and Yahoo Mobile’s other user customizable features to all mobile users; a far larger market than those of us with high-end devices.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It looks like Yahoo is slowly replacing their legacy mobile web portal with the greatly enhanced\u00a0 one that they announced at MWC and which I reviewed a Beta of in April.\u00a0 According to a press release issued today users with supported handsets in Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, Australia, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Spain and Italy should be seeing the updated site. The April Beta was launched in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Germany, France, India, Indonesia and the Philippines. Today’s additions bring … Continue reading
\nYou can experience the new version today by downloading the latest Opera Mini mobile browser: mini.opera.com
\nClick here to go to the classic Yahoo! homepage<\/p><\/blockquote>\n