Yahoo! Mobile site up for a facelift…..

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Things have been changing rapidly in mobile internet space in last few months. If I were to say that the year 2008 has seen some speedy facelift of mobile services on mobile internet than ever seen before then I wouldn’t exactly be exaggerating!! New services with Mobile 2.0 user interfaces and cool stuff have been popping up here and there and old players have also woken up from their slumber to do a bit of house cleaning and decoration. Giants like Google & Microsoft have also realised the importance of mobile space & its emerging popularity. Afterall, mobile internet is no longer remaining a thing of exclusivity and people are embracing it.

Yahoo! was also sleeping so far. If you were to have a look at current Yahoo! mobile website then you would be rather surprised how ancient it looks, straight out of the early 1990s and indeed not a pretty sight.

But this troubled giant is no longer sleeping as far as the mobile space is concerned. While it has been working on its mobile software suite Yahoo! Go for quite sometime, it seems that the team behind mobile website has also woken up and are preparing for a bit radical facelift of the mobile website. Yes, indeed it would look radical as you can see in the screenshot alongside that the new version that they have been working on looks way too much better than what the current situation is. And this is just the homepage of the mobile website, how it can & will probably look (once you are signed in).

For this new website they seem to have done away with all those ridiculous portal features like free downloads, movie stuff etc. and instead have put up three of their more consumer centric services - email, messenger & flickr photo sharing.

Along with those they have added the usual but useful widget like tidbits like ability to show current weather of a preferred city, some feed on latest news, finance and sports. And ofcourse the mobile version of Yahoo! oneSearch is also there.

Looking first at the email, I’d say the inbox looks quite neat & light & straight forward without any clunkiness. Its a simple partial listing of emails in inbox ordered by date and if you scroll down then you get option to either see more of the inbox (if available) or you can choose to see emails in any other folder if you so wish.

The emails are rendered in a mobile friendly textual format & open quickly. Since its all a single column deal, the options are available at the bottom of the page where you can choose various options like deleting an email or replying or forwarding or moving to a folder etc.

The compose screen is also quite simplistic. But one thing that I noticed and liked is that if you have your Yahoo! Mail configured to send email from more than one email address then there’s a From field on the compose mail page which lists all the email addresses from which you can send email. Gmail does not provide this drop down in its mobile version - neither on its mobile website nor in mobile software - which is rather odd but not surprising.

For the Flickr part, well, though Flickr has its own mobile website to which they are giving a facelift as well, its also available in this Yahoo! mobile website. The page opens with a typical Flickr greeting in one of the many languages of world and then you have various options like checking out contacts’ latest photos or selected photos from all over Flickr and seeing latest activity on one’s own photos. They have also integrated Yahoo! oneSearch with Flickr here meaning you can use that to search Flickr from here which doesn’t sound bad.

The messenger available on the mobile website is just like what it is at present, they have not applied this new look to it yet but will do so hopefully before rolling this new version of mobile website. But I don’t think there would be anything fancy there, just a simple HTML refresh based messenger as it is right now.

Though this upcoming new look of the Yahoo! mobile website is quite simplistic without any bells and whistles but its quite straight forward and neat and doesn’t look shabby & ancient like the current Yahoo! mobile website. Its in beta right now and you can access it here.