Yahoo! unveiled part of their new strategy at CES 2008, and showed how they were planning on taking on Google in the mobile phone space. Whereas Google has the new Google Android platform, which is a set of technologies for device manufacturers to use in order to create Android-compliant phones (and thus easily use Google services), Yahoo! is making its strategy far more open by releasing a set of software tools that will work on any mobile phone.

Well, I say any phone – currently they don’t work on my Nokia E90, which is a top of the line Series 60 phone complete with all the bells and whistles you think you’d ever need. And herein might lie Yahoo’s problem…

First – some problems with Yahoo’s mobile approach

Google’s Android phone is designed to provide a platform for new mobile phones, all of which will be able to integrate seamlessly with Google’s core services, as well as with the features of the phones themselves.

From a developer’s perspective, this is the mobile holy grail, as it means you’ll know exactly what external services your phone will be able to make use of, and also how much control you’ll have over the phone’s features.

in contrast, current phone are an absolute nightmare to develop for. Every phone is different with no end of different features, there’s no indication of what web services your phone will support, and different manufacturers offer differing levels of access to their phone’s features. Worse still, some operators will disable some phones’ features (such as the ability to connect to to VoIP networks), meaning that just because a phone can support a particular technology doesn’t actually mean that it will!

So Android offers a fresh approach, providing a consistent platform that developers need to create truly great applications.

Even Microsoft offers a similar platform in the shape of Microsoft Windows Mobile, which although arguably not as open as Android, and certainly not as Web-centric, still provides a stable platform on which applications can be developed.

Unfortunately, there aren’t that many Windows Mobile devices out there at the moment, and there are no Google Android devices at all yet.

Yahoo’s approach, on the other hand, is to their Yahoo Go software available to every phone. However, this means providing a consistent platform on which developers can build their applications (or widgets, in Go! terminology), and then making sure that that platform works on existing phones.

Go! is therefore a sort of middleware between the non-interoperable mess of the hundreds of different phones beneath the Go! platform and the consistent uniform space provided on top to the individual widgets.

Great idea in theory, but it does require Yahoo! to make the Go! platform as widely available as possible, and to do this, it needs to make it work on your model of phone in order for you to use it. if it’s only available on a few phones, it’s adoption rate will be seriously weakened, both by users and by developers.

The fact that it won’t work on a Series 60 Nokia E90, but will on a Series 60 Nokia N95 shows just how far Yahoo! has to go in order to make Go! a viable and successful product.

Still, that said, the platform is still in beta, so it’s early days yet, and it does hold quite a bit of promise.

On the brighter side…Yahoo Go! 3.0 overview

So what exactly is Yahoo Go! 3.0? In short, it brings together all of Yahoo!’s many and varied services into one mobile application, as well as providing a platform for other software developers to develop their own widgets to add to the service.

Yahoo! showed off widgets it’s developed based on the new platform that allow people to check MySpace, eBay and MTV on the go.

Speaking to BBC News, Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang said “Bringing a rich web experience to mobile devices is not an easy task. There are literally billions of mobile users, thousands of different devices and hundreds of different carriers.

“The challenge is to create a simple starting point for all of them.”

If you haven’t used Yahoo! lately, then you might not be aware of quite how many different services it offers. As well as its search engine, it also own Flickr (the photo site), Del.icio.us (social bookmarks), and offers its own email service, mapping service, weather, travel and the Internet’s largest music store (and you thought it was iTunes!)

Yahoo Go! 3.0 brings all of these together in one mobile application, letting you check the weather, the news, traffic details, get directions, get answers to specific questions, see photos of specific places along your route, and a host of other services, which can only improve as other developers come to the party.

If Yahoo! can get Go! 3.0 to work with as wide an array of different phones as possible, then it might just have a hit on its hands, and certainly something that can counter Google’s Android platform.

Indeed, this is part of the company’s strategy. In an interview with Reuters, Yahoo!’s Marco Boerries said “We have a different approach. We are not about building phones. We are not about building another (mobile software) operating system. That would be too limiting to what our goals are.”

“The question we are trying to answer is how can Yahoo enable and lead an ecosystem for billions of mobile phone users, not tens of millions of users (of phones running Apple, Google or Microsoft-based software),” Boerries said.

Of course, in order to do this, it has to roll its services out to the hundreds of different models that exist. Apparently, they’re preparing to do just that, though, which bodes well for the future of the service, but they’ll need to continually updating that support over time, as the manufacturers aren’t about to adopt a common mobile platform any time soon. This will need to be a continual development investment from Yahoo! if they’re to keep Yahoo! Go 3.0 current, but they’re certainly making the right noises. They’re also talking to Motorola and LG to get Go! installed on their phones out of the box.

One thing’s for sure – with Google’s Android and now Yahoo!’s Go, the major search engines are entering the mobile space in a big way, and software is becoming a big issue, which is a sure sign that the mobile Web is finally becoming a reality. With the iPhone disrupting the mobile market from an interface point of view, the next stage of the phone’s evolution is in the services it can provide the user, and these are all coming from the Web.

2008 – the year the mobile Web finally became a reality! Sure it might have been hyped for the past 8 years, but better late than never!

[Source: Reuters, Yahoo!, BBC News]