Yahoo! Released Mail and Messenger Apps for Android along with Debut of HTML5 based Mobile Websites for iPhone and iPod Touch

Yahoo! released the Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger Apps for Android as well as a Yahoo! Search Widget for Android. Along with those apps, Yahoo! also debuts a new Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! News mobile websites for iPhone and iPod Touch to support HTML5 technology. At the moment, the Android apps are optimized for three Android devices including Motorola Droid, HTC Incredible, and Google Nexus One. These apps which support Android OS 2.0 and above are now available for download globally via Android Market.

See the features of Yahoo! Mail App for Android below:

• Receive push notification of new email messages
• Send emails to contacts from the Yahoo! Address Book as well as contacts in the native phone address book
• Search email messages by sender, recipient, subject and keywords in the body of the email
• Upload photos as attachments directly from camera or the photo gallery
• View and download attachments
• Insert emoticons and rich text formatting into emails
• Effectively manage and organize their Yahoo! Mail messages, folders and manage spam
• Toggle between the Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger apps with ease

And below are the features of Yahoo! Messenger App for Android:

• Easily message friends, check friends’ status updates & availability as well as update their own status & availability
• Send instant messages to friends via SMS text messages*
• Stay connected with full support for multitasking allowing the app to work in the background; with push notifications consumers can easily catch new messages and friend requests
• Full use of emoticons and rich text formatting
• Send photos to friends directly from the phone’s camera or the photo gallery

As for the HTML5 based mobile websites for iPhone and iPod Touch, currently it’s only available to preview on an opt-in basis but the Yahoo! team expect to upgrade all eligible users to the new version shortly. This new webapp is available globally in 28 languages in over 200 countries. Although at the moment it’s optimized for iPod and iPod Touch which means in Safari browsers, it’s expected to expanded via other Webkit-enabled browsers later.

According to Yahoo! team, the HTML5 based Yahoo! Mail webapp offers the following features:

• Faster and more reliable: off-line mail access and local search enabled by local caching capabilities give consumers access to their mail anywhere, even out of network coverage
• Smart: find the message you need, whenever you need it. With our Full Search feature, personal folder creation & management and Smart Folders with messages from key contacts
• Rich: view rich photo and video attachments in full, or as preview directly in the inbox, as well as HTML messages
• Seamless & unified experience with Yahoo! desktop Mail

To see the preview of this webapp, visit m.yahoo.com/mail from your iPhone browser and tap on “Preview the new Yahoo! Mail”. Or you can also see the short preview on the video below.

When i tried to access this webapp from my iPhone and logon with my Yahoo! ID, there were message said that my Yahoo! Maill will soon be upgraded to bring those features below:

• Offline email access
• Full Search (from/to, keywords and filetypes)
• Photo and video attachment previews
• Smart Folders

Once you get access to the app you can add it to your iPhone Home Screen for easy access later. However after play for a while with this new webapp, it seems like the app is really slow especially when loading the messages. However the offline email access is really worked. And the most interesting feature i like is the photo and video attachment previews which is not available in the Yahoo! apps for iPhone.

Have you tried these apps? Let’s share your experience here!

[via: Yahoo! Mobile Blog]