Yahoo! has announced a new widget platform called the Yahoo! Mobile App for Smartphones. Huh. Look familiar? Due to go public at the end of May on BlackBerry, Motorola, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Windows Mobile, and Nokia devices. A slightly different one for the iPhone will be available for the end of March. By using an XML-based language they’re calling Blueprints that will work across all of the devices, Yahoo! Mobile hopes to make things easy for devs who want to get something out without having to tweak it for a bajllion different phones. Aside from that, Yahoo! Mobile plugs quaintly into all of their web services, like Maps, Mail (no Exchange, but lots of other webmail offerings), Finance, Messenger, News and More. The app also builds on their previous mobile endeavours with oneSeach, including web search by voice recognition. Their Pulse widget keeps tabs on what’s going on on your favourite social networks, all integrated into a single feed. OnePlace is also there, jamming all of your most regularly updated info (stocks, weather, RSS) into one window.
For one, this is pretty ambitious. For two, it’s confusing. Will people really want to overlay a second virtual OS onto an existing one to access applications that the native platform will likely already have, and which probably be better integrated? (Oops.) Even Opera is coming on there, making this thing potentially the most redundant piece of software imaginable. On the other hand, if Yahoo! can pull off something that legitimately bridges the development gap across multiple platforms, then these widgets could carry Yahoo! mobile up to the same demand level of native applications. That all depends on creating enough end-user hype for those widgets, and I really don’t see that happening when software makers are more than willing to segment their products to different handsets, and even play favourites. Yahoo’s been chugging along the mobile train for awhile now and have offered more than a few compelling products leading up to this, and if they continue at this clip, we could be seeing a Y!Phone in the near future to duke it out with Android.
[via Yahoo!]
