San Francisco — Yahoo has recently been pretty busy lately with revamping and offering customizable homepage in an attempt to compete with its rivals. On Tuesday, Yahoo announced that PC to mobile sync of the new Yahoo homepage is available on over 400 devices in 17 countries, although Apple iPhone users will be the only ones to receive the new functionality.
“As the leading Web brand on mobile in the U.S., Yahoo! serves up nearly 1 out of every 2 mobile Internet users in the country — more than 34MM unique users per month,” a spokesperson for Yahoo said in a statement. “We deliver simple, open, compelling and feature rich services that allow individuals to define their Internet experience on mobile.”
iPhone users can now view the new home page at m.yahoo.com, which points itself around three tabs: “Today,” oriented around news; “My Favorites,” a portal to Yahoo Mail, Gmail, stock quotes, weather, RSS feeds, and other selected content; and “All Sites,” a list of all Yahoo properties. Yahoo’s current mobile home page is more vertically oriented, placing the content in a series of stacked menus that can be expanded.
Yahoo’s new iPhone-optimized Web site. (Credit: CNET/Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt)
Yahoo recently re-designed its desktop homepage, placing importance on customizing a dynamic set of services. A Yahoo spokesman said that is in part because Yahoo is returning to its roots as a portal; not only by using the homepage as a gateway to other Yahoo products and services, but also providing a starting point for managing third-party content, such as Facebook.
This suggests that if you set up your customized version of the new Yahoo homepage on your computer, you can easily set it up to be the same way on your phone.
Yahoo has also introduced mobile optimized versions of some of its most popular web properties like the homepage, search, local, finance, news, mail, movies, address book, calendar, weather, etc. However, these are only available on the iPhone Safari browser at this point.
The iPhone redesign of the homepage apart from the three tabs indicated in the image also includes a drop down menu to filter searches by specific categories like web, images, local, news, Wikipedia, and products.
“Of course, we analyze the consumer’s intent to provide the best answers and results grouped according to the query,” says Yahoo.
When a user navigates to Yahoo.com from the desktop browser, you will be able to click a link at the top of the page to try out the redesigned home page. You can then move to m.www.yahoo.com (which is very distinct from m.yahoo.com on the desktop).
“I think the overarching goal looking at this is to want to provide consensus, with a seamless experience regardless of how you are accessing Yahoo, via a mobile device, the PC, or a TV,” a Yahoo spokesman said.
From there, a much vivid design that is flanked on the left by a list of modules–Favorites–that you can add and activate. These include Yahoo finance, eBay, Facebook, MySpace, Movies, Maps, Messenger, Weather, and so on. Hovering over the module displays a summary and some points for interaction. Clicking more deeply may short-cut you to a new Yahoo page.
Similarly, several mobile pages — Search, Local, Finance, News, Mail, Movies, Address book, Calendar, Weather — have been optimized for Apple’s Safari browser, Yahoo said.
Both Yahoo’s new iPhone-optimized Web site and its new favorites-focused Web app operate now in the following 17 countries: U.S., Canada, U.K., Germany, France, Spain, Italy, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, Australia, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina.