Got a moment to play with Yahoo! Go 3.0 Beta on Symbian hardware and it looks pretty nice. It has a sort of carousel interface with news, maps, and messaging and, sadly, doesn’t really filter images for taste and aesthetics, as we see here.

It works with Blackberries, most Nokias, and the UIQ Sony-Ericssons.

They were also showing off Yahoo’s oneSearch on the iPhone, which is a web page optimized for Safari and looks about the same as everything else that’s written for Safari. Strangely, the booth was stuffed way in the back of the show here along with AOL and the porn purveyors. Sad sad sad.

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The New York Times rightly recognizes that not everyone wants to look like a zero, whipping out a BlackBerry every 27 seconds to check their e-mail. That said, who wouldn’t want to periodically read some e-mail, so long as it doesn’t become obtrusive? Mr. Pogue looks at a few services and apps that lets ordinary cellphones, in one way or another, check e-mail. Woo~!

Gmail for Mobile is a small Java app (hence, no Verizon users need apply) that faithfully reproduces the popular Web-based e-mail client on the small screen. The only problem here is that you need to manually check your e-mail—no wild beeps or vibrations when an e-mail arrives in your inbox. That might not be so bad, though, since all that network activity required to automatically check e-mail really eats up the battery.

Google’s rival Yahoo has a mobile app of its own called Yahoo Go 2.0. Really terrible name aside, this one can be configured to check your Yahoo e-mail automatically. You can also check in on various Yahoo-owned services, too, like Flickr and maps. Since it tries to be a jack of all trades, it runs a little slower than Gmail for Mobile and works on even fewer cellphones.

Lastly, there’s Teleflip, a service that converts any and all e-mails into a text message that any cellphone should be able to receive. You have to make a whitelist of e-mail address that you want Teleflip to textify to your cellphone. You should also recognize that text messages can only contain a limited number of characters, so larger e-mails will need to be split up.

So that’s it. A couple of ways for the average cellphone user to check their e-mail while on-the-go. Of course, you could also just fire up your cellphone’s Web browser, but that’s a little less sexy. (Yes, as if checking your e-mail is something to get all hot and bothered by.)

How to Make Your Cellphone Act Like a BlackBerry [New York Times]

I got the chance to play with the Symbian version of Yahoo Go, Yahoo’s standalone networked application that offers news, weather, traffic, and Yahoo! search from a handset. It’s fairly full-featured and even supports Yahoo mail.

Am I blown away? No, but for a 1MB handset app it definitely has a lot going for it. It’s very similar to Helio’s HOT service, in a way, and points to where handset applications are going. Rather than offering a blank screen — a dialtone, as it were — manufacturers are trying to grab that initial phone real estate that pops up when you turn the thing on. Whereas that area was once sacrosanct, it is now considered dead space ripe for the monetizing.

We’re just getting started…

The real draw here is the search and maps. Whereas most mapping sites are butchered in handsets, a standalone application like this one allows some relative control over the rendering. The map I brought up of New York was very usable and fairly quick. The rest of the features were gravy, though. Not much substance but fun for a little while.

Finance news? OK. Fair enough.

Ahhh… the real news, only smaller.

Sports news. Note the balls used to designate sports. Classy.

Entertainment news. Angelina’s taking a year off, I hear.

Flickr? OK, that’s something I can support. Nice.

The weather is primed to your Zip code. It’s petty cool.

Search takes a while to start and results are scrunched together.

Feh. The page has been repurposed for the phone and looks like a mess.

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Yahoo! Go for TV previously allowed users to peruse various general streams from Flickr (“interestingness” for example) but will now provide access to personal photos so those can be shared with a group around the tube. Windows Media Center allows photo display but doesn’t include an online component.

The Yahoo! movie recommendation engine on Yahoo! Movies asks users to define their taste on a continuum from indy to Hollywood and then rate up to 10 apparently psychologically revealing movies. It then suggests movies playing in theaters near you, movies available for purchase on DVD and movies playing on TV. The previous version of Yahoo! Go for TV didn’t offer any personalized recommendations. Windows Media Center allows movies to be purchased through MovieLink.

The ability to access locally stored music is already available from Microsoft’s product and the feature’s absence was a common complaint when Yahoo! Go for TV launched. I won’t try to do an extensive comparison of the two services here, but if you are interested in a media center type service then you can check out Yahoo! Go for TV will be a more full featured option starting today. Flickr users may be particularly interested.

The feature list is comprehensive: Use Yahoo Go to manage photos, search Yahoo videos, watch stored movies on your hard drive, listen to music and manage television shows via a full DVR (like Tivo or Microsoft Media Center). Yahoo Go is only available for Windows machines.

It’s going to be hard for Yahoo Go to compete with Microsoft’s Media Center for the simple reason that it won’t be built into millions of PCs like Media Center is. But at least they are now in the game. More from GigaOm (my head still hurts from drinking scotch with you last night, Om) and Dave Zatz.

Screen shots below.