Yahoo! launches mail and messenger apps for android

For quite some time now, connecting to your Yahoo account to the Android OS was a pain. However with the new standalone apps for Android, things have become lot easier.

Leveraging with the latest HTML5 technology, Yahoo has also upgraded its Mail and News sites for Apple's iOS. One can download both the Mail and Messenger apps via the Android market, but they're only available for devices with Android 2.0 or higher.

Targetting a wider audience, Yahoo feels it would keep one connected, whenever and wherever they want. "Yahoo! keeps 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!.

"With the availability of our world-class Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger apps for Android and by harnessing the latest in HTML5, we're 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," he explained.

The new Mail features include the ability to receive push notification of new email messages, send emails to contacts from the Yahoo! Address Book as well as to contacts in the native phone address book, search email messages by sender, recipient, subject and keywords, upload photos as attachments from the phone's camera, view and download attachments, insert emoticons and rich text formatting into emails, effectively manage and organize their messages, folders, and spam.

In addition to the features, it also provides opportunities for advertisers to reach a highly engaged mobile audience. Samsung is the inaugural advertiser with a rich media display advertising unit.

And with the latest Messenger services, one can easily message friends, check friends' status updates and availability and update their personal status and availability. One can also send instant messages, via SMS, stay connected with the app working in the background; with push notifications and also send photos to friends directly from the phone's camera or the photo gallery

The one-click search facility will be the plus point of the Yahoo Search Widget. Once the widget is installed, a Yahoo! Search box is easily accessible on the home screen. With voice search for easier input, Search Assist for quick suggestions and recommendations, and auto-locate technology to deliver locally relevant results, it is expected to become more user friendly.

The HTML5 gives a faster and sophisticated mobile browsing experience for the consumers. The upgraded Yahoo! Mail offers consumers a webmail experience that is fast and reliable and that easily surfaces rich content.

With HTML5 Yahoo! Mail consumers can now view HTML messages; compose rich text messages, reply, search emails, and access folders while offline, manage folders and create smart folders with messages from key contacts, attach photos and videos directly to the mail.

However Indian audience will have to wait for a bit longer as the Search Widget is currently available only in US on iPhone and iTouch browser. However the product is soon expected to be available in other countries and on additional devises as well.