I finally got a chance to play with the new mobile widgets that Yahoo released Monday. I tried Yahoo! Go 3.0 and the revamped Yahoo mobile portal both of which are completely widget based. Users can add and remove widgets, which include Yahoo stalwarts like Mail, News, Finance, etc. as well as the first few examples of third party content. Eventually any developer will be able to submit to widgets to the Widget Gallery but for now there are just three third party widgets, MySpace, eBay and MTV News, for Yahoo Go and six more, Sports Illustrated, recipes from Epicurious, shopping blogs Bargainist, Outblush and Uncrate from Zombie Corp and local movie listings from Big Screen Cinema for the new mobile web portal. Update: MySpace, eBay and MTV are widgets, the others are all snippets. Snippets and widgets are available both on the portal and Yahoo! Go.
First I tried Yahoo Go 3.0. I had no trouble loading it from get.go.yahoo.com using the uberphone, N95-3 Nokia gave me at Mobile Camp SF. This Java application is visually stunning and loaded with features. It combines a full featured email client, which unlike the mobile web version of Yahoo Mail lets you follow links in emails and move emails to folders. There is a Push Email feature but I couldn't get it to work on the N95, always getting a connection error when I tried to open an email, possible because I'm using WiFi instead of GPRS or HSDPA for connectivity. There's also map viewer and web browser plus lots of eye candy into a single 700 KB (huge for mobile) .jar file. The mail and maps modules compare favorably in terms of features with Google's separate standalone Java applications. Maps uses the N95's GPS and delivers maps, driving directions and local search. It doesn't do traffic overlays like Google but has a very neat heading feature that displays an arrow to show the direction you are moving, something Google doesn't do.
I was familiar with Yahoo Go, having used the 2.0 version for a while mostly to check the weather and my Yahoo Mail. I'd always found Yahoo Go a bit slow especially when switching from one module like mail to another such as weather, although the mail module was fine once you got it going. I was hoping that 3.0 had gotten a speed boost but it seems to have become even slower. In addition to slowness switching modules, scrolling is slow everywhere, even in mail which wasn't a problem in 2.0. Most of the time it doesn't display an hourglass or other visual wait clue while it's unresponsive either. I found myself repeating keystrokes thinking they hadn't registered and then having the extra key presses played back after Go woke up resulting in overshooting my intended link or button.
The user interface, while pretty, has some usability issues too. Yahoo has implemented their own custom controls for text entry. Unlike the native Java text boxes which open a separate window for typing, Yahoo's are inline, like text fields on a web page, which is nice. But the custom text boxes are slow to respond to key preses and don't support the N95's copy and paste functions or entering special characters the "normal" way using the N95's "pencil" key. I found it very frustrating to do text entry in Yahoo Go until I discovered the deceptively named Insert special charac... item in the Options menu, which appears only when a text field has focus. It brings up the familiar N95 Java text entry window which is responsive, supports cut and paste and lets you enter special characters the normal S60 way.
Yahoo makes much of Go's "Carousel" main menu interface (top image). Well, it IS a new paradigm, and looks nice, but again, it's slow. You can't scroll through it rapidly and you can only see a few of the widgets at a time so unless you have memorized their order you never know whether it would be faster to move left or right to reach a given widget. There is an alternate menu interface, the "Home Page" which the default widget in the Carousel when Go starts up. Click on it and you get a simple scrolling list menu that works well as long as Go doesn't decide to go to sleep for a while while you are scrolling. Update: The Home page contains content that's not in the Carousel and vice versa. The Carousel is where Widgets live, the home page is all snippets. Most of the Yahoo widgets have an associated snippet to launch them from the home page but none of the third party ones do.
At this point I have to consider Go 3.0 to be an early Beta, with too many issues to be very useful. I 'll probably continue to use it for mail, but not much else. I hope the performance issues can be solved but even if they are I feel that Yahoo is trying to do too many things in one application. Single purpose Java mail and mapping applications work very well on almost any phone as shown by Google Mail an Maps, Flurry Mail, Opera Mini and many more. Trying to combine too many functions results in a monolithic application that runs slowly and only on high end phones.
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posted by Dennis Bournique
June 12, 2008 @ 12:26 am
7 View Comments
