Yahoo! Go? Yahoo! No!

Yahoo MobileAndrew Orlowski tried the Yahoo Go service and was singularly unimpressed. This three-page review is really a letter of complaint, but the issues it raises are universal for mobile applications. To whit, just because something is technologically possible (or brilliant) doesn’t mean it’s a good idea, just because something works on PCs doesn’t mean it works on mobiles, and most importantly: Users want to maintain control of their phones. I get annoyed when some program adds icons to my desktop, I get doubly annoyed when I can’t remove them…and that’s one of the minor things on a PC. I shudder to think of experiencing that on a mobile phone with less space and less memory.
Some specific quotes:
“Not only was data now flying at me when I didn’t want it – alerts were coming up which I hadn’t requested, and, as the software began to do its stuff, I was even losing control of the phone.”
“While a control panel (pictured) lets you choose which services to synchronize with, the software is designed to interpose itself between you, and what you want to get done, at every opportunity. I don’t use Yahoo! Photos, and ensured it wasn’t synchronized. But that didn’t stop the software popping up a message every time I took a snap, asking me if I wanted to upload it to Yahoo!…So, after a while, I stopped taking pictures at all…And it’s the cult-like thinking of the web people that really causes the problem, as they assume for example, that we want to publish everything we do.”
“And as time wore on, I found I could run fewer and fewer applications concurrently. Even though I’d specified that Y!Go store its messages in folders on the removable MMC card, it gradually ate up available memory on the phone, which is finite, until I could no longer run Opera. (And here too, the “You’re In Control” promise rang hollow: Y!Go doesn’t let you choose your preferred browser. It defaults to firing up the Nokia browser, and if you prefer Opera or NetFront, you’re out of luck).”
Related stories:
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