Yahoo! is one of the few companies from the early dotcom boom that still dominates the web today. It's no surprise then, that the firm wants to extend it's reach onto handheld devices, and has billed Yahoo! for iPhone as ' the starting point for mobile Internet'.
The program works in a similar way as the Google Mobile App, in that it acts as a portal not only to the search functionality itself, but also to all the various services and applications that Yahoo! offers. You can use the app as a means of getting straight to the content you are interested in.
Yahoo! Mobile is navigated using a toolbar at the bottom of the interface which houses five tabs. The first, 'Featured', shows you a selection of the current featured content from Yahoo!. This includes 'Today on Yahoo!', as well as entertainment news and hot searches. This content can be localized to your area via the Settings menu. The second tab, 'Y! News', gives you an overview of the main stories of the day. To read the full story you the program will fire up Safari on your iPhone for you to view it.
'My Interests' is an interesting feature of Yahoo! for iPhone, whereby you can search for things that interest you, and the app will display various types of content relating to that person, place or thing (web sites, news, RSS, weather, etc.) Alternatively, you can customize it using the 'Quick Add' feature to insert channels such as weather, stocks, bookmarks, RSS, and more.
The 'Connect' feature in Yahoo! is one thing that stands out above the Google Mobile App. It allows you to assimilate your social networks, so you can track updates from services such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Bebo, MySpace, etc. You just need to enter the logins for all the various accounts once, then Yahoo! for iPhone will update you on friend activity across all these platforms.
The final tab, 'More' is similar to the 'Apps' section in Google Mobile, and is where you'll find access to iPhone-tailored versions of things like Yahoo! Messenger, Flickr, Calendar, Finance, etc.
Of course, Yahoo! for iPhone wouldn't be complete without a search facility, and this one is pretty powerful, with a number of settings for things like SafeSearch. Search Assist, and location awareness. There's also an integrated voice search, though, like the Google equivalent, this is pretty raw at the moment, and you'll find yourself constantly shouting the same word into your phone over and over again to get it recognized.
This small-screen friendly version Yahoo! is great for quickly checking what's happening online. It's just a bit annoying that you have to leave the app for Safari anytime you want to study content in greater depth.
