Yahoo Mail is Gets a Boost and Leaves Beta
Yahoo Mail Beta has been around for a couple of years now, the slick feature-rich design was initially offered through invites only, then for paying customers only (that’s when I joined) and lastly, about a year ago it opened as a Beta version for everyone.
Over the weekend, Yahoo Mail Beta had become official while removing the Beta label and adding more usable feature with the most important one – Email-to-SMS, allowing people to integrate web & mobile into one interface. This will allow many parents who are not into mobile features to communicate with their kids / send reminders and more.
From the official announcement:
We already have great integrated instant messaging features in Yahoo! Mail, so adding text messaging was a natural next step. It’s an increasingly popular way to keep in touch, especially among younger users. In fact, 69% of US mobile phone users between the ages of 18-39 use text messaging (Harris Interactive, June 2006), and half of Americans age 18-25 say they sent or received a text message over the phone in the past day (Pew Research Center, January 2007).
Other interesting features added are shortcuts (hovered keywords pop-up a map, address, contact info, etc) and more, with the only thing not implemented (yet) is free pop3 access which is offered for $20 a year and for free by GMail.
