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I installed the beta of Yahoo Go 3.0 for WM Smartphone and have been messing around with it for a while. Wanted to highlight some features and issues.

All in all it is an interesting application for mobile. The basic gist of the app is that all the information is navigated through small mobile “widgets”. You scroll thru them and when you launch a widget, you get a specialized version of the site or service off which the widget is based. Lets start with the interface:

The custom UI (carousel motif) is fun to use and is nice looking. It’s actually a refreshing UI. You can tell they spent a lot of time working out this motif.

There is a library of widgets available inside the app itself, from which you can choose to your liking or need. It also looks like there is an SDK that developers or companies can use to create these widgets.

I noticed that most of the “Yahoo Developed” widgets I tried were reliable. I didn’t have as much luck with some of the 3rd party ones, like Facebook and Trapster. Additionally, I had initially installed a MySpace widget, that ceased to work and was mysteriously no longer in the widget library when I tried to re-install it (though it is still advertised at the download site as one of the flagship widgets–I can only assume there are contract or technical issues pending).

The Wikipedia Widget is probably the most useful one, to me. It does a nice job of parsing and formatting the info.

As for all their news feeds widget… eh, I am probably more likely to use a mobile rss reader like mDigger or Viigo, but it’s nice to have the option to add some news.

The maps widget didn’t work with my GPS service and didn’t seem as useful to me as say, Google Maps or Windows Live search. Additionally, I couldn’t find a “full Screen” toggle for the maps, but I will keep looking.

Bottom line

While it has some issues, it’s important to remember that this is a Beta, and that it’s FREE. They obviously have some things to fix, and hopefully the politics over at Yahoo right now won’t get in the way of finishing this little app. It’s definitely more of a “consumer” app and not really a “power user” app, in my mind. I would use it for certain things, but probably not as my mobile hub (which is how I think they are pushing it).

Jay Donovan (50 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook