Last spring's CTIA Wireless conference saw Yahoo majorly refresh its m.yahoo.com home page for mobile visitors. At Wednesday's keynote talk, David Ko, Yahoo's senior vice president of Mobile, unveiled a refresh of that redo.
Most significantly, Yahoo includes pagination on the landing page, which imparts access to Yahoo's top story headlines and movie posters without having to reload the page. As on the iPhone, dots at the bottom of the news or RSS module indicate how many more "pages" await. You'll still need to reload pages to read the full text stories.
Yahoo has also fleshed out its RSS reader to display photos with their captions, and includes the capability to scroll through your favorites feed without having to stop to refresh the page.
Video is a hot topic in mobile, and Yahoo wisely promotes its own shows on the mobile page, in addition to a video playlist that makes use of thumbnail images instead of just text, as in the previous version. Also in the entertainment vein, Yahoo's enhanced mobile site displays movie play times near you. As with previous versions, movie trailers and Yahoo and Rotten Tomatoes reviews are viewable, and you can also buy tickets through a partnership wit MovieTickets.com.
The initial home page overhaul last April must be working. Yahoo reports "a fivefold increase" from this April redo. Yahoo further reports that the use of its mobile site has more than tripled from August 2007 to August 2009.
Yahoo's refreshed mobile home page is available now in 32 markets.
During his keynote, Yahoo's Ko also touched upon Yahoo's mobile strategy, which has become more focused on partnerships. In other words, gathering together a suite of Yahoo and non-Yahoo suites and services for visitors to Yahoo's site. This seems to return Yahoo to its original role as an Internet portal.
Ko also discussed the app store success of three focused, cross-platform mobile applications for Blackberry and iPhone: the Fantasy football, Flickr, and finance apps launched last month.
This article was first published as a blog post on CNET News.
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