Yahoo announced the coming of Yahoo Mobile, a long-awaited upgrade to its mobile web service, at the Barcelona GSMA World Mobile Congress.

The existing downloadable mobile service, Yahoo Go, is now part of the larger picture of Yahoo Mobile. Major features of the upgrade:

• oneSearch - Mobile search, with voice-activated search for smartphones. Yahoo's mobile search still ranks below Google, weighing in at 800 million mobile users.
• onePlace - For accessing and managing favorite content, such as news topics and sources, RSS feeds, weather conditions, sports scores, stock quotes, websites/blogs, horoscopes, and movie theaters.
• oneConnect - an iPhone app that organizes content and activity from multiple social networks or sites. oneConnect also includes Messenger, Address Book, Calendar, and Yahoo Mail, which has been the most visited mobile destination in the US over the past couple of years.
• For smartphones, a Mini Opera mobile browser, maps, and widgets.

Yahoo Mobile will be available on the mobile web as an application for the Apple iPhone, and for smartphones from Nokia, RIM (Blackberry), Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Motorola, and those powered by Windows Mobile. A version for Google Android is in the making, according to Search Engine Land, citing an email from the company.

It will also serve as a development platform for other mobile applications, Yahoo said.

A managed beta program is already available, and expected release dates for iPhone and mobile web applications are March'09, and May '09 for the smartphone applications.

In March '07, Yahoo teamed up with Microsoft to expand the reach of its "Go for Mobile 2.0" service, allowing users to access their email, photos, and other accounts from anywhere.