Sunnyvale, California — Striving to keep pace with it rivals, Internet pioneer Yahoo Inc., on Thursday unleashed two free new Android apps — Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger, in addition to a Yahoo! Search Widget for Google’s mobile operating system. The company also stated that it had beefed up its Mail and News sites for Apple’s iOS devices by adding support for HTML5.
While this release might not be the first option for Android enthusiasts with Gmail and Google Talk integrated into the OS, if you have got a Yahoo! account the new apps could be pretty handy. Hop through to find out what features Yahoo! has crammed into its first Android apps…
“Yahoo! Mail and Messenger are available as an independently streamlined apps, however they offer common features that will allow you a better mobile communications experience that is easy to use and instantly familiar,” says Yahoo Mail Product Manager Lee Parry.
And, as long as you are sporting a phone with Android 2.0 or higher, you can freely download both the Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger apps from the Android Market right now.
Additionally, “Both these apps lets you compose messages with rich text, express yourself through our many Yahoo! emotions, access Yahoo! Address Book and phone contacts, as well as share photos that you have taken on your phone.”
“Yahoo retains more than 600 million consumers around the world connected to the people and things that matter to them most — wherever and whenever they want,” said David Ko, senior vice president, Americas, Audience, Mobile, and Local for Yahoo, in a statement. “With the availability of our world-class Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Messenger apps for Android and by harnessing the latest in HTML5, we are making it easier than ever for consumers to access fast, reliable, and feature-rich Yahoo experiences across some of the fastest growing platforms in the market.”
The Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger applications for Android imbues an appealing user interfaces, complemented by new functionality, along with a wide range of enhancements specifically added to the package for the Android platform. Both the app includes push notifications, which allows you to send emails using your Yahoo! address book as well as your phone contacts, upload photos and view and download attachments. If you grab the Yahoo! Messenger app too, you can access it from within the Yahoo! Mail app.
“Both the Mail and Messenger apps for Android provide many of the core features that you find in their PC counterparts,” adds Perry. For example, “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.”
Like its email obsessed compatriot, the Yahoo! Messenger Android app is pretty simple. Also, the new Mail features also debuts a new ad platform for Yahoo, with a display ad by Samsung making its debut. With Messenger, Yahoo users can now check friends’ status, send instant messages via SMS, multitask with the app running in the background, use emoticons, and send photos.
Yahoo’s inclusion of HTML5 does not seem to have added too much to the Mail app, apart from the ability to read HTML emails and manage folders. But Yahoo said that the News app has a new animated interface, with photos, slideshows, and video features. Yahoo will add support for additional devices and countries later, the company said.
The apps can be downloaded from the Android Market on devices that support Android 2.0 and higher, but the search widget is only available in the USA for reasons unknown.