Going Mobile: New Android Apps, Mobile Web Mail Available Today

At Yahoo!, our goal is to help you stay in touch with the people who matter most in your life. Whether it’s on a PC, a smartphone, an iPad, or a TV, we want to bring you a Yahoo! communications experience that you can enjoy on any Internet-connected device. Today, I’m thrilled to share with you two announcements that bring this vision even closer.

The Best Yahoo! Communications Experience — for your Android Phone
First, we’re excited to unveil Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger apps for the Android operating system. These are the first Android applications that Yahoo! has ever released and we couldn’t be happier to be sharing them with you today. You can download them from the Android Market for phones that support Android OS 2.0+, such the popular Motorola Droid, the HTC Incredible and the Google Nexus One.

Yahoo! Mail and Messenger are available as separate streamlined apps, however they offer common features that will give you a better mobile communications experience that’s easy to use and immediately familiar. Both apps let you compose messages with rich text, express yourself through our many Yahoo! emoticons, access Yahoo! Address Book and phone contacts, as well as share photos that you’ve taken on your phone.

The Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger Android apps offer many of the core features that you find in their PC counterparts. In the Yahoo! Mail Android app, you can search for important messages with our Full Search and Smart Folders features and organize messages into the same personal folders you use on the PC. In Messenger you can set your Yahoo! Messenger status message, view the status messages of your buddy list contacts and chat with your MSN/Windows Live Messenger friends. For more details on the Messenger app, click here.

Give them a try today! You can download the Yahoo! Mail and Messenger apps from the Android Market.

For additional information, visit http://mobile.yahoo.com/mail/android.

The new HTML5 mobile Web Mail for iPhone and iPod Touch – A smarter, faster, and richer mobile mail experience
For our second announcement, we are upgrading our mobile Web mail experience with a faster, more feature-rich version. We wanted to give our nearly 300 million Yahoo! Mail users more options to access our service on the devices they love. The newest version of Yahoo! Mail, available today as an opt-in trial, has many of the features that you’ll find on our PC version and leverages the power of HTML5 to deliver an app-like experience never before seen on the mobile Web. It’s a mobile email experience that is:

• Faster and more reliable: If you’re offline, Yahoo! Mail uses local caching capabilities to help you access and search your messages even without an internet connection.
• Smart: You can find and organize your messages using Full Search, personal folders and Smart Folders with messages from your most important contacts and optimized views for photos and file attachments.
• Rich: View rich photo and video attachments in their full form, or as previews directly in the inbox view.
• Seamless & unified experience: Going forward, you’ll see a consistent look and feel, whether you’re on a smartphone or a PC.

During the trial period, our new mobile Web mail experience will be available in 28 languages across more than 200 countries. We’ve optimized it for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch running iOS 3.0+, with more mobile devices and platforms on the way.

The new HTML5 version of Yahoo! Mail is available as an opt-in beta, though we expect to upgrade everyone to this experience shortly. Get started by visiting http://y.ahoo.it/mailbeta on your phone’s browser, or by visiting http://m.yahoo.com/mail and tapping on ‘Preview the new Yahoo! Mail’.

We’re really excited about both our HTML5 Yahoo! Mail experience, and the awesome new Android applications, so give them a whirl and don’t forget to come back and let us know what you think!