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Well, isn’t this just the cluster**** of all cluster****s (use your imagination). Carrier SoftBank in Japan has introduced a “Yahoo Phone” complete with licensed branding and possibly a completely customized version of Android. Users will get preinstalled Yahoo applications and, for the cost of the phone, two free years of Yahoo Plus. Yahoo is apparently the nation’s biggest website so it should turn some heads just as we figure a Facebook phone in Europe and the Americas would.
Yahoo didn’t go and order extensive R&D for hardware, though – this one’s a rebranded Sharp AQUOS PHONE THE PREMIUM SoftBank 009SH. It has a 4 inch qHD display, an 8 megapixel camera sensor, WiFi, Bluetooth and Android 2.3. On top of that looks to be a custom Yahoo-centric user interface that will give you access to time, weather, stocks, news, social, search and more right on your homescreen.
We’ll probably never see this phone make outside of Japan, but interesting and very ironic nonetheless. SoftBank is set to offer it to their customers next month. [TechCrunch]
Doesn’t that contradict itself?
Get your own OS Yahoo.
When will Compuserve release it’s phone?
I hear you on that, but I’m holding out for the more awesome Geocities phone that should be released anytime in the near future.
People still use Yahoo? O_o
In Japan for some reason Yahoo! is still the number one search engine.
Did you Google that?
Haha so ironic…
Japanese Yahoo has been partnering with Google since last year, and has been using Google’s search engine and ad-distributing tech.
So this phone is not a bad thing for Google.
They will also likely make money from it.
A lot of people still use Yahoo.. It’s one of the better Web portals left out there.. Yahoo, att.net, and Excite are the few that I know of that still give you the ability to customize them for content, layout, colors and themes.. Excite is losing steam, as after they were purchased their content keeps dwindling.. Every now an then you will notice something just gone.. Between Yahoo and att.net, I prefer the att.net site., They have the same content but I prefer the way I can lay out the page with it… As to portals in general, yes you can Google, or go directly to news or other sites of interest, but I still think portals are useful.
Next up – the Microsoft phone running iOS.
More likely Windows Phone 8…. running Android.
Heh, and people think Blur sucks!
People talk about bloatware on other phones…..
I’m waiting for my Geocities phone.
My god, that’s a name i hadn’t seen in a while. My first “website” was hosted there… you know back when a single page with an horrendous background was considered a website.
wow, that is interesting lol.
I never use Yahoo and for that matter, I rarely use
google. I prefer Bing…But that is pretty crazy to see.
I want to see videos of the device
I don’t use Bing much, but the few times that I did I enjoyed the experience.
What about a lycos phone?
It’s actually a pretty good match for them. Yahoo is the only provider other than Google who has a complete account sync conduit for Android (for email, photos, calendars, and contacts), so it’s clear that they like Android as a platform quite a lot, regardless of what they think about Google. Flickr is still way better than Picasa, too, and while Yahoo as a whole seems kind of niche-y, they still have a lot to offer.
I really hate to think that Google ends up taking over the entire Internet and phone ecosystem, so IMO something like this is a pretty good thing.
Incidentally, my mom basically uses her T-Mobile G2 as a Yahoo phone as it is – even without Yahoo Plus it makes her life a lot easier to have her email and contacts and such at Yahoo, and she’s not a fan of GMail (or Android’s native GMail client). As far as she cares, the GMail account is just a burdensome thing that she occasionally uses for downloading apps.
Ahhhh.
Clusterfu**, what a great Dane Cook reference. :3
+1 Quentyn
It’s about time Yahoo did something interesting with mobile devices. I think AOL should do the same thing with their email, news, weather, and video functions. I mean… it won’t catch on, but they are both way behind and need to take a big step or die.
There’s the perceived wisdom that Americans don’t understand irony. That seems to grate you yanks, so you have picked up the habit of using the _word_ “irony” whenever wherever, whether suited to the context or not. Alas, you usage is wrong: What you mean is actually “contradictory” or “paradoxical”, and not at all “ironic”. Hmmm … I guess i agree with that perceived wisdom after all …
Hurray for stereotypes?
No, not at all. Didn’t you read the article through to the end? Quentyn gives us a nice example of an unfortunate lack of understanding of the meaning of irony:
“We’ll probably never see this phone make outside of Japan, but interesting and very ironic.”
So he’s confirming the stereotype, not I. As an aside, your own not-reading-through-to-the-end is very much in danger of confirming yet another stereotype of yanks … hehe.