I use Yahoo Mail a lot on my phone, all mail to the wapreview.com domain gets forwarded to my Yahoo account and I end up reading much of it on my phone with Opera Mini. Unfortunately reading Yahoo Mail on a phone is a bit of a pain. I can’t use the N95′s built in email client as Yahoo doesn’t support IMAP and using POP3 with multiple clients (desktop and various mobiles) is insane. Neither the full or mobile versions of Y! Mail work very well in Mini. It’s fairly easy to read mail in both but the JavaScript driven drop downs for moving messages to folders in the full version don’t work at all with Mini’s somewhat limited JavaScript implementation. With Yahoo’s mobile webmail client, I can move messages easily enough but Yahoo removes html links from the body of messages. Not good as much of my email consists of people sending me links to mobile sites.

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As for Yahoo Go!, I tried version 2.0 but didn’t like it. I prefer doing everything in the browser, It takes longer to start Go! and have it retrieve the latest email headers than to just load mail.yahoo.com in Opera Mini. Plus when you follow a link in an e-mail, Go! uses it’s built-in mini-browser to show a transcoded copy with no way to open the original in a real browser. Go! 3.0 is out now. Maybe it’s better. I haven’t tried it yet, I’ve you have please leave a comment with your experiences.

I’ve also used gMail’s “Basic HTML” version on the phone and it works perfectly with Opera Mini. I’d switch everything to gMail but for one thing. Y!Mail Beta – Message MenuIn an effort to reduce SPAM, I try to keep my primary email address somewhat hidden and use alternate addresses that I can delete when they start getting too much junk mail. In gMail, when I reply with an alternate address, Google still shows my primary gMail address in the Sender: and Return Path: headers. Yahoo doesn’t do this. Google says this to “help prevent your mail from being marked as spam.” No one’s ever complained about my email being “marked as spam”, but I do know that by revealing my “real” address, Google is subjecting it to SPAM.

I think I’ve finally found a better way to do Yahoo Mail on my phone. It’s the mail client that is part of Yahoo’s Beta personalized mobile portal at beta.m.yahoo.com. I’ve written about the Beta before but never used it much. It was just too buggy, especially the e-mail portion. It seemed like at least half the time I tried to open or send an an e-mail, I’d see:

“We have run into a problem processing your last request! Please try again later.”

Well, I started using the Beta again last week, read dozens of emails and sent a few and so far I haven’t seen that or any other errors. Finally, a single Y!Mail client where I can move mail to folders and follow links and have them open right in Opera Mini. The Beta is my new preferred way to use Y!Mail on my phone. Y!Mail Beta – Personalized PortalThere are some nice touches in the Beta, I like that when I get to the bottom of a message there’s a menu (2nd image) with choices for disposition of the message; Delete, Move, Reply, etc. I’ve also started using the Beta’s personalized home page to check news headlines, local weather and (falling) stock market. The portal (bottom image) is pretty slick with lots of predefined content modules to chose from, even a WapReview snippet . Plus you can add your own links to any sites.

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Not that the Y! Mobile Beta is perfect. I wish the end of message menu had a Next link for those times when I want to leave a message in my inbox (so I can reply later from a PC) and go on to the next one. True, there is a Next link at the top of the page but it would be nice to have one at the bottom too. And there is an annoying bug in the display of both mail headers and news headlines. The text wraps at 160 pixels instead of using the full width of the screen. You can see this in the first and last images on this page. It looks ugly and is harder to read. This doesn’t happen with all browsers, the full screen width is used in S60WebKit for example. I looked at the markup and Yahoo is using a layout table with a cell width of 160px for Opera Mini. I guess this is meant to be a compromise as Mini runs on devices with varying screen sizes. I wonder why they don’t just set width to 100% and let Mini deal with fitting it to the screen?

Yahoo has been rolling out the Beta incrementally. It originally worked on only a handful of phones but support seems to be pretty widespread, It’s available with Opera Mini and in the built in browsers of three of my test handsets, the N95-3, Motorola Z8 and Motorola i855, but not on a Nokia 6200. I’m in the US, I don’t know about the Beta’s availability in other markets.

Courtesy of Dennis Bournique of WapReview

The last US presidential elections discovered the full potential of the web as a tool and a necessary communication channel. It seems a safe bet that from now on the mobile will also be a critical channel for political candidates to communicate with the voters.

Barak Obama’s presidential campaign made history last weekend by sending out 2.9 million SMS messages announcing Joe Biden as the Vice Presidential choice. It is the first presidential campaign to make a major announcement via SMS, and it is also perhaps the largest mobile marketing campaign ever in the US.

They also have a full and well designed mobile web site that is much like a commercial mobile web site in its thoroughness and complementarity to the web.

They also provide such things as wallpaper download, ringtones, mobile videos and viral tools like send-a-friend.

Obama is the first campaign to actively use the mobile channel to communicate with supporters on such a large scale in the USA. There have been other political organizations outside of the USA to use the mobile as a channel such as Sri Lankan political parties, politicians in India, Europe and even in Africa. Even the Taliban have resorted to using wallpapers, ringtones and SMS messages and the Israeli Army used with success psychological warfare via SMS messages during their last war in Lebanon against Hezbollah.

Although exact numbers were not released by the Obama campaign, Nielsen Mobile estimated that 2.9 million people received the text message.

In another example of how Obama has made good use of mobile, the campaign was able to alert its supporters to the August 7th AFL-CIO Presidential Forum and broadcast on MSNBC. During and following the event they also used mobile to solicit feedback and get questions from supporters about the Senator’s position on issues that were debated.

According to Nic Covey, Director of Insights at Nielsen Mobile, “The value of the message goes far beyond the 26 words and 2.9 million recipients. Here, Obama branded himself as cutting edge, inflated the already enormous press attention paid to his VP pick and further established a list of supporters’ most coveted form of contact: their cell phone numbers.”