Yahoo! Mail Beta – Faster, Easier and More Social( Chat, Free SMS, Tweets, Facebook)

Yahoo! Mail Beta is released to the public providing safer and social email experience. Yahoo! Mail Beta is designed to be sleek, elegant and consistent to work seamlessly across devices such as iPhone, iPad or Android device. It provides a faster email experience, which is more than two-times faster than previous versions of Yahoo! Mail.

The Messenger and SMS features are improved to organize the conversations in separate tabs, switch between text and chat conversations and dock the conversation window when you are multitasking.

With the new yahoo mail, you can read your friends’ tweets, retweet or compose your own 140-character message alongside Facebook posts and Yahoo! status updates all from the What’s New page.

Gmail maybe India’s most used email service since Oct’09, but Yahoo! is still the most ‘popular’ worldwide(273-million users). Today, it has announced a new opt-in Beta version which, in its own words, will be ‘Faster, Easier, and More Social.’ The idea behind the UI revamp is to give it a consistent look across all platforms – desktop, mobile, and tablet devices.

The new Beta claims to be more than 2 times faster than the previous version. It also offers anew and improved spam protection filter. The search feature has been tweaked and is capable of more refined searches. Video content and slideshows from Picasa/Flickr can now be played within an email and storage is unlimited.

Those were the under-the-hood changes. Now let’s look at the visible ones. The new Interface has been heavily inspired by Yahoo! Mail on the iPad and Android. When you log into your account, it first takes you to a ‘What’s New’ tab which represents the ‘more social‘ part of the beta. It allows you to view and share content across Facebook and Twitter.

After playing around in the new Beta version for sometime it did seem faster than the older version which I was running side by side, and while I found nothing particularly wrong with the new features they’ve added. It’s not enough to make me budge from my Gmail account. Not even close!

I also noticed on my Twitter timeline some of my friends grumbling about the fact it din’t work with properly with IE9. Since there is no IE for the mac, I couldn’t check this myself. Apparently this is what happens -

How Yahoo! managed not to test it on Microsoft’s IE9 is beyond me. But we’ll let them run, given they are both Beta versions.

The Yahoo Mail Blog signs off with this -”As you can imagine, we have big plans for Yahoo! Mail Beta. Our engineers designed Yahoo! Mail Beta in a way that lets us make changes fast, so stay tuned as we release new enhancements over the coming months.”