Do you Yahoo? If so, you can now download Yahoo! onto your iPhone or Touch for free. Yahoo has combined news, weather, social networking, and other features into an all-in-one application with a few new features, like a “press and speak” voice input for searching and the ability to customize your own interests for quick viewing.

I use Yahoo on my home computer so I already had a Yahoo account and navigation of Yahoo on my Touch was easy. I also have a Yahoo application on my Blackberry device for searching as well. While I’m not exactly comparing apples to apples here and I was using two different wireless networks, I’m still gonna have to say that the Yahoo app for iPhone seems far better than on my Blackberry.

I prefer the text input on a device with buttons over touch screen, but I found the load time faster on Apple’s device. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get a good test of the voice input this go-round, so I’d love to know if other users find this feature responsive and useful.

Exploring the available options on Yahoo for iPhone, I discovered I could quickly access news headlines, sports, and social networks. The news headlines didn’t match up to my Yahoo homepage, but they were current enough. The search function is more than adequate, though you will find yourself doing some back and forth between Yahoo and Safari, which is weird, but the back button seems to always return you to Yahoo if you entered Safari through the app itself.

Being a current Yahoo! user, I definitely appreciated the ability to access my Yahoo address book, but I’m baffled as to why I couldn’t import my Yahoo bookmarks. I looked high and low for that option.

Under the “My Interests” option, I selected a local newspaper, which immediately uploaded local headlines at a glance (the headlines were outdated, but I believe that’s on the news outlet’s end not Yahoo’s). There is also the option to select specific stocks, weather, and bookmarks here, but again, no import of existing bookmarks, just manual addition.

All in all, Yahoo! for iPhone is probably more than satisfactory if you currently use Yahoo and even if you don’t, it’s a pretty convenient all-in-one if you want to set up an account. You can receive updates from Facebook, Twitter, and a couple other social networks, RSS feeds are simple to set up and customization options are available, but not as comprehensive as a home page. You may find some other features you find useful and Yahoo is free to download so you’ve nothing to loose but time if you want to give it a test drive.

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category: Editor's Picks, General News, News, RSS