Inspired, perhaps, by the Palm Pre's brilliant Synergy feature, which gathered web services all in one place, CTIA saw a number of apps that tried to accomplish the same. Two titles, the Yahoo Mobile and 3deep, particularly made their mark.
Yahoo Mobile
It's pretty much the concensus that Yahoo Mobile is possibly the best social networking platform shown off at the show. Revamped and redesigned, it's been transformed into an easy-to-use and customizable one-stop shop for staying connected across numerous web facilities. Yahoo's Mobile Apps And Portals provide users a single UI for a wide variety of content and services, including:
- Search engine
- Email (not just Yahoo, but also Gmail and a host of other providers)
- Yahoo messenger
- RSS feeds
- Social networking (Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Twitter and more)
- Yahoo contacts
The facility is accessible via browser from all web-enabled handsets or through a standalone app for the iPhone and Yahoo's Go app for other major mobile platforms.
3deep
While Yahoo Mobile won audiences over with their social networking support, 3deep took the cake as the most innovative of the social-based apps presented in the show (despite the unfortunate monicker). What it does is allow other users to get multi-dimensional status updates about you (your location, availability, schedule and such). Instead of having to call you up to know if you're coming to work, for instance, your supervisor can open the app and see that you're already on the road, five minutes away.
It manages to gather all that information by analyzing a variety of sources, including email, calendar, contacts, social networking sites and GPS. Of course, you can control what kind of information you're willing to share so you don't have to worry about compromising too much of your privacy without needing to. Currently in beta, the app will be available as a free download for Windows Mobile sometime during the next two weeks.
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