After reading on MobileCrunch about Yahoo! Go for Mobile, I quickly installed the application on my smartphone. At first I was pretty stoked. I’m a big fan of Yahoo! and use a lot of their tools. Although the Go app was basically a pretty font end to existing Yahoo! web properties, it did seem to be slick.

After a few hours of Go running on my phone, I found another cool feature: it synchronized all of my Yahoo! contacts and calendar events with those on the phone already. Then when I used ActiveSync to connect to Outlook on my laptop, anything new from Yahoo! was added. I instantly thought was was exactly what I was looking for since I hadn’t successfully synced my Yahoo data with Outlook in over a year.

Soon however, Yahoo! Go started falling apart. It appears that the sync mechanism uses the same logic from the crappy Yahoo! Intellisync software that I’ve always despised. It added calendar events I didn’t want, deleted other important work meetings from Outlook, and duplicated a ton of my contacts. I wasn’t going to give up right away however as the idea of my phone acting as a data hub between my work life (Outlook) and my personal life (Yahoo!) was too appealing. I manually worked through most of the syncing issues over the course of a few hours.

Then Yahoo! Go started crashing my phone’s Windows Mobile OS. It did this a lot; like every couple hours. Although the resource monitor on the phone didn’t report that a ton of memory was being used by Go, I was routinely running out of memory when trying to check mail or start a web browser. Restarting the phone was the only solution. After a 4 days of battling the software, I uninstalled.

I checked the Yahoo! Go site and they are not calling it beta software. I don’t even see any version information on the site. Perhaps I’ll try again in six months. In theory, Yahoo! Go for Mobile was exactly what I wanted, it just failed to live up with poor technology behind the scenes.