6. Yahoo Go 2

Yahoo Go 2 combines a lot more information about places than the other applications. For example, you can get an overview of traffic in town, as a list of problems or as a map with traffic blackspots and accidents; with Google Maps and Live Search what you’re seeing is the average speed of traffic on the road, but not what might be slowing things down.

That also means Yahoo Go has a lot of screens and sub-sections; you scroll down to the carousel selector, across to a section and then through sub-sections. This is more intuitive to use than it is to describe, but it is possible to end up on a screen you weren’t planning to look at, and if you make a mistake it can be hard to navigate back to the section you want. It can also take a while for a new section or search results to load; this makes sense for pages you load from the Web, but searching for contacts in your address book takes just as long. Performance may be suffering because this is Java rather than a native application.

There are sections for news, finance, weather, sport and entertainment, as well as the OneSearch section with location information. This last option combines a lot of the Yahoo services, which is useful if you use them and unnecessarily complicated if you don’t.

Create a OneSearch for a location and you get a long page with a city guide and what’s on guide at the top, plus weather, local news, Flickr photos, web images, web sites and news photos. Click though to start searching and you get the canned searches first: ATMs, gas, movie theatres and restaurants at the top, and more categories below. You can’t drill down through sub-categories like you can in Live Search, which gets you results without as many clicks but doesn’t give you the same control over what the results are. Different categories don’t always give you different results: choosing Restaurants often gives you nearly the same results as Fast Food, for instance, and you’ll sometimes wonder why you’re seeing a business.

You see the first nine matches in an area, but if that’s not what you want you have to type in a specific search. Navigate with the numeric keypad and the map jumps to the right place; if you don’t want to wait for the animation to get the next result you can choose the text list, but this is hidden on the menu.