Yahoo! brews HTML5 mail for iPhone
When the App Store punts urls
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Hadoop Summit Yahoo! is developing an HTML5 incarnation of its web-based mail service for use on the Jesus Phone.
The company's new chief product officer — former Microsoftee Blake Irving — unveiled this new-age version of Yahoo! Mail this morning at the Hadoop Summit in Santa Clara. What does this have to do with Hadoop, the open source distributed number crunching platform? Not much. But Irving is doing every thing he can to convince the world that Yahoo! is still a technology company. Which it is.
Like so many others, Yahoo! is using the HTML5 handle in the broadest of senses. By HTML5, it means the latest web standards, including not only HTML5 but things like CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and JavaScript. The new HTML5 Yahoo! Mail is not a downloadable application. It's a web service accessible solely through a browser. But Yahoo! is tailoring the service for use on specific devices and operating systems, beginning with the iPhone.
The company will also offer versions specifically built for the iPad, Android, and Palm's webOS. Irving said the iPhone incarnation will be released "pretty soon," and Yahoo! research head Prabhakar Raghavan told us it's likely to arrive sometime this summer.
Though this is not a downloadable application, Raghavan tells us that Yahoo! will likely offer the service through the Apple App Store and other mobile application marketplaces. This would involve users, well, grabbing a free web link from the store and adding an icon to their mobile devices. But this only makes sense. Though the Googles of the world have promised that web apps "have won," the reality is most mobile applications must be downloaded and they're funneled through app stores.
Google is already offering an HTML5 version of Gmail for both the iPhone and Android. These were announced in April of last year. ®
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COMMENTS
You are missing the point.
While i agree the iphone is a personal device and having a real mail client would be better, the web aspect of yahoo and other mail means that you dont just have to use your piddly little device, you can use any device with a web browser. I have two web based email addresses. Had them for years and i am not about to change them. Having them restricted to one main machine is impractical, and managing multiple machines with different mail clients is just a pain (not to mention impossible on my employer's locked down machine). Web is more flexible even if it isnt "better".
The html 5 thing means little as email is no longer the electronic communication of choice. and besides, my yahoo based mail works on the iphone's native email client and even push notification works half of the time! Heady days lads......
RE: Missing the point?
I think you may be. Although the iPhone has a great client built in, this now puts all your mail in a single box, and lists your accounts. Yahoo and Hotmail accounts are often used as secondary, shall we say "personal" accounts which users may not want other people to see. This means that there probably are people wanting a good separate email client such as this to retain the privacy of their private account.
bootnote: in case the above isn't clear, I meant an account for shagging around, adult websites etc :)
Missing the point?
Uhm, isn't web-based email primarily for those without a computer they can put a real mail client on? Including for those families too stupid to use multiple accounts on the single home PC?
The iPhone by definition is a personal device, sharing it among people is rare. It has an IMAP client that's a far superior experience to what any HTML5 implementation could ever be.
Am I missing the point, or is Yahoo?
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