Yahoo! launches Go 2.0 mobile services

The battle for the mobile space is really heating up. With Google already going public on a tie up with Samsung that will see 3 core Google services (Google Search, Maps and Gmail) preinstalled on millions of mobile phones worldwide, it really was only a matter of hours time before Yahoo! announced a similar deal.

Called Yahoo! Go 2.0, the new application can be downloaded to approximately 70 popular mobile phones and will display a modified version of the Yahoo! homepage. Users will have access to Yahoo! Search, Flickr (not sure how large images will look on small displays), Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Weather, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger and your Yahoo! address book.

That’s quite a list of services, more than Google made available in their deal with Samsung. Personally it looks to me that they wants to get a foothold in the mobile market and push their contextual advertising. Yahoo! have tied up deals with 10 international carriers, but they have failed to come to a an agreement with any of the large US carriers.

It isn’t cataclysmic that they are launching without any presence in the US, but it certainly isn’t good when you consider Google will be on the millions of Samsung phones sold in the US market. For them to get any traction in the US Yahoo! really needs to get a move on and sign a deal with a carrier or manufacturer soon.