With the arrival of Yahoo! and its Yahoo! Go Mobile 2.0 product, another A-list brand has entered the market. Yahoo!’s presence, like Apple’s, expands the number of ODP (On-Device Portal) choices available to consumers, offering data services that are embedded directly onto the devices that people carry with them every day, similar to the desktop applications that people have downloaded on their PCs.

So, how does Yahoo! Go stack up?

It draws on many ODP cues to deliver some interesting usability features. However, its drawbacks serve as cautionary examples for other companies considering the launch of their own mobile on-device portals.

Yahoo! Go’s Advantages
Yahoo! clearly understands that its mobile user experience will make or break its mobile offering. With Yahoo! Go, Yahoo! relies on the power of ODP to deliver that experience, effectively bringing the Yahoo! desktop experience to the mobile device. Yahoo! Go delivers the following capabilities:

• Brand continuity: Yahoo! Go will delight devotees of the Yahoo! Web experience. The look and feel delivers on Yahoo!’s “Internet on the go” promise. The design and layout brings the key brand elements of the Web to mobile devices. Yet another wise move: Yahoo! Go integrates key Yahoo! web applications into a single, unified portal.
• Superior application navigation: As a unified portal, Yahoo! Go not only reinforces brand continuity, it improves navigation. Users move between applications – “widgets,” as Yahoo calls them – via an easy-to-use, offline carousel interface.
  
• Automated personalization – Yahoo! Users: Yahoo! Go users with Yahoo! web accounts enjoy simple application personalization. All personalization choices made to a Yahoo! web account are associated with Yahoo! Go upon sign-in, so the services are automatically personalized.

Yahoo! Go’s Gotchas
Just about any mobile application is going to have its weak points, and Yahoo! Go is no exception. Interestingly, a few of its downfalls result from Yahoo!’s incomplete embrace of the ODP philosophy, causing Yahoo! Go to fall victim to many of the early mistakes that hindered some of the original ODP market offerings.

• Manual personalization – non-Yahoo! Users: Yahoo! Go users without a Yahoo! Web account should brace themselves for a round or two of intense typing to manually personalize content feeds, locations for Local & Maps features, etc.
• Limited offline capabilities: The beauty of an ODP is that it lets consumers do more navigation offline without repeated trips to the network. When a user enters Yahoo! Go, they can enjoy a little offline exploration of the services, like news headlines or top searches, but, unfortunately, the offline navigation options stop there without going deep enough to add much value to the user. A missed opportunity!
• Limited PIM integration: Yahoo! Go integrates with Yahoo! Mail, but Yahoo! Mail is not integrated with the mail capabilities on the mobile device. Users don’t have a single location for their mail. Instead, they have to bounce between the PIM functions on their mobile devices, and the Yahoo! Mail application.
• Big, monolithic application: Integrated, modular applications – good. Integrated, monolithic applications – not so good. Yahoo! Go’s 507Kb- 1.41 Mb is a big footprint in the memory-constrained world of mobile devices. Yahoo! Go’s all-or-nothing packaging leaves some users out of luck. Users without, say, a Flickr account are stuck with Yahoo! Go’s Flickr application unless they remove the entire Yahoo! Go application.
• Images-only multimedia: The oneSearch feature lets users search images, and Yahoo! Go users that do have a Flickr account can post pictures to that account. That’s it for multimedia. No streaming video, no streaming audio.

Yahoo! Go’s Future
Yahoo! has made a solid first attempt at delivering a mobile user experience that offers many of the usability benefits that ODP technology brings to the table. How Yahoo! plans to monetize Yahoo! Go isn’t clear. Perhaps it isn’t important to the company. What should be important to Yahoo! is how to further simplify personalization, enable PIM integration, and support streaming media. And if Yahoo! Go is going to run on mass-market handsets, it must appeal to all mobile users – those with Yahoo! accounts and those without.