Yahoo! expands its mobile reach, upgrades its offerings
By Annie Turner
Rating: room for improvement
Yahoo! has signed mobile search deals with six Asian cellular operators and is about to take its Go for Mobile 2.0 service out of beta in the US. The Asian partnerships will give Yahoo! access to some 100 million subscribers and will be available in the Philippines, India, Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia and Taiwan.
In its home market, Yahoo claims is has completed successful beta testing of its Go for Mobile 2.0 platform and plans to launch localised beta versions in 13 other countries (Canada, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Spain, UK, Thailand and Vietnam) tomorrow. Improvements are said to include faster loading time, better email and maps, one click access to address book, diary and other on-device facilities, plus improved search results from Yahoo! oneSearch.
The new version of Yahoo! Go 2.0 will be available on more than 200 mobile phones in the US by the end of July and more than 400 by end of year. It will be pre-loaded on new devices from Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, LG and HTC which will available later in the year.
It looks like Yahoo! has made a big effort to overcome the considerable deficiencies in its mobile offering, but it still isn’t available on enough handsets. The good news is that its search was already superior to Google’s before the tweaking. We look forward to trying it out.
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