Yahoo! Go v.3 for Pearl 8130 review

Posted on Saturday, 8th March 2008 by Bull

Back when I had the Motorola Q, another program that I had used extensively was Yahoo! Go. A great little app that allows you to access all of Yahoo’s cool services, two of the important ones being Mail and Flickr.

This is important since Yahoo! does not have free POP access, unless you pay a fee. However, you can access it for free through this neat little Blackberry application.

Yahoo! Go is in version 3 Beta. In this review I may expect to see some errors. Hopefully not.

So let’s get started!

Point your mobile browser to this address: get.go.yahoo.com

Yahoo will automatically detect which software your running on your Blackberry, to make sure it’s compatible. Note: 8130 release just came out February 28th, so it works. Once on the site Click on the Download link and your Blackberry will launch it’s normal Application download process. Once installed, Yahoo! Go will ask you to punch in your username and password and agree to a quick EULA (excuse my lack of screenshots for the setup process, but it’s pretty straightforward).

After a brief loading period, you come to the home screen of Yahoo! Go v.3 And it’s beautiful!

What you see is a pretty little cloud background with some floating icons (widgets) along the bottom. A message tells me I can press * to manage the carousel of widgets. Not just yet. Lets scroll to the right using the trackball:

Wow I didn’t know I had that many unread emails. I also see that the blue button at the bottom has up and down arrows. I begin to scroll downward and I see a whole new menu appear!

So this is neat. It’s like a shortcut menu to things I can do within Yahoo! Mail. Lets open the inbox and take a peek. I open it and press the menu button.

So I have a list of all my emails and when pressing the menu button, gives me a list of options. I notice some of these have symbols from the touch pad of my phone, telling me I can hit those from the Inbox list instead of pressing menu first. Those are already lots of improvements from Ver. 2 Pressing # takes me back to teh Carousel of widgets.

Next up on the Carousel is Flickr! I can’t express how much I love my Flickr photo album. And it’s accessible right there on Yahoo! Go.

After pressing on Open, the app takes me to a Very nice Flickr menu with loads of things to choose from. (Left to Right are me scrolling down the page)

As I can see here, I can do pretty much everything that I can on Flickr, but it’s even better cause it’s with me all the time. Let’s explore some of these options.

I’m gonna click on Upload Photos.

After a brief waiting period as the application searches my phone for photos, it brings me to a small preview page, where I can select multiple photos and then upload it to Flickr.

I can then select the picture (in green highlight) and add a description, tags and choose to make it Public or Private. Afterwards I just hit menu and then Done.

There are many more features of Flickr that you can explore here, but I’ll let YOU do that

Next on the Carousel is an icon of a newspaper, which obviously means news feeds.

And there you have it, Yahoo! News. But not only does it give a preloaded list of news sources from all around the globe, you can also add your own news feed (RSS), or blog etc.

So that’s really cool!

There are a few widgets on the Carousel that are uninteresting to me such as Sports and Stock info, so I’m gonna skip to weather:

This is really cool. On the main Carousel page I have a quick glance of what today’s weather will be like, and if I click on Open it takes me to Current conditions and the week ahead if I scroll down. Now notice that this is directly linked to my Yahoo! account as well, because Yahoo! already has this information on file in my profile (the zip code), which then links to Weather.com and is fed through here. Once again this is very nice to have. Note: You can also add more cities through yahoo.com in your profile.

Uh oh, another map program. Let’s see what it has to offer! (I just now discovered that the red exclamation mark in the top left means I have new email since I last checked it, which is another new feature.)

OK we have a few promising buttons to push here, so I’m gonna click on Map view.

As you can see I’m already playing with the different view modes of Yahoo! Maps which every other map program has: Road, Satellite and Hybrid. The first thing I noticed, is the speed at which these maps loaded: FAST! I’ve noticed with Google Maps and Windows Live Mobile that they maps took a while to load. Not this time. If I scroll left and right, it instantly refreshes with the new images required to fill the screen. Zooming takes a little longer but that’s OK, everytime you zoom in, it’s using completely differnt pictures, which is understandable. As far as Driving Directions go, it’s pretty straightforward like most other mapping applicatons:

So let’s check out the last Widget on the Carousel:

Wow, this is really cool! They have widgets for different websites, and you can add your own. Let’s see if I can find Facebook. Hmm nope. Oh well, let’s play with the ebay widget:

Cool again! I now have a mobile version of eBay, that’s very useful! I’ll leave you to play with that as well. Lets move on to the last (or first) widget in the Carousel:

Ah nice, here I can remove those widgets that I don’t want, like sports and stocks.

Well, there are a few more things about Yahoo! Go that you can explore, like settings for each widget and tweaks here and there, but I’ll let you find those! On exiting the application, in the bottom right it tells you your total data usage for that session: