It’s been about a year since Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) said it was making a big smartphone push by focusing on making applications for the various platforms, namely iPhone and BlackBerry.
Today, it is announcing that Yahoo Mail and Messenger are available for free on Android. It also has built a search widget which lets you search from the home screen using voice input. It requires downloading separately, but it isn’t really an application.
It’s unclear why Yahoo has taken so long to come out with its first Android apps. On the iPhone, it has a whole portfolio of products, including Fantasy sports, Flickr, Finance and multiple search options.
Regardless, the Android apps have been executed fairly well. For instance, if you are in the Mail app, you can switch to Messenger without exiting, and vice versa. You can also attach photos to e-mails as attachments, and search your mail by sender, recipient, subject or other keywords. As for the Messenger app, users can run in the background and receive notifications when they get a message.
And, in order for an app to be successful, it must have a monetization strategy. Yahoo said that the Mail app is launching with Samsung as the inaugural advertiser with rich media display units. This includes seeing an ad in your mail queue as if it’s a new message. The search widget is available only in the U.S. for OS 2.0 or newer.
We can surely expect more Android applications coming from Yahoo. Perhaps, in an ironic twist, we’ll see Nokia (NYSE: NOK) maps coming to Android through a partnership Yahoo inked with the handset-maker to make it the exclusive, global provider of Yahoo

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