• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, July 1, 2010

Bidding for a bigger presence on Android phones, Yahoo Thursday introduced Yahoo Mail and Messenger applications for the Google mobile platform. It also rolled out a search widget that allows voice-activated search from a phone's home screen.

The Mail app lets Android users get push notification of new messages, send emails to contacts from the Yahoo Address Book and native address book, upload photos as attachments directly from a camera, and toggle between the Mail and Messenger apps, among other features. The Mail app also offers rich media ad placements, with Samsung on board as the inaugural sponsor.

Through the Messenger app, people check status updates, send messages via SMS text, send photos and engage in multitasking while the app runs in the background. In that instance, push notifications let users know when new messages come in.

In addition to offering voice input, the new stand-alone search widget for Android displays suggested search terms when someone types or speaks a query and provides shorts, news and deep links in results. Someone searching "World Cup," for instance, would see the latest scores and stories tied to the soccer tournament. The widget is only available in the U.S. for Android 2.0 or higher.

In addition to the new Android apps, Yahoo also launched HTML5 versions of Yahoo Mail and Yahoo News for the iPhone and iPod touch. Yahoo said the upgrade would provide a fuller, desktop-like Yahoo Mail experience, promising faster offline mail access, search and the ability to view photo and video attachments. Yahoo News features a new layout with more multimedia including animated visual effects, photos, video and slide shows.

To date, Yahoo has been more focused on developing apps for the iPhone than Android, launching more than half a dozen titles for the Apple device including its fantasy baseball and football games as well as Yahoo Sketch-a-Search and Yahoo Shopping.