• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, April 18, 2013

During Yahoo’s first-quarter conference call Tuesday, CEO Marissa Mayer explained the company was shifting its focus from “getting people to believe in Yahoo” to rolling out new products. To that end, the Web portal today debuted a new Yahoo Mail app for the iPad and Android tablets, as well as new weather app for iPhones.

The tablet version of Yahoo Mail does away with “chrome” like buttons and tabs to provide a more magazine-like that takes advantage of the full screen and lets users swipe through emails. Senders’ images and messages replace folders and toolbars.

The new look and feel of Yahoo Mail for tablets, which Yahoo is promoting as “Unbox Your Mail,” also allows people to automatically group by sender, and delete, star or move messages with a swipe to reduce clutter. “We've designed Yahoo! Mail to take full advantage of the tablet making reading your email faster, easier and just a little bit more fun,” wrote Lee Perry, sr. director, mobile and emerging products, in a blog post today.

Yahoo’s new weather app the iPhone and iPod touch, meanwhile, integrates Flickr so users can see uploaded photos of the weather in the cities or regions they’re monitoring.

The Yahoo Mail update on tablets follows the company’s revamp of the desktop and smartphone versions of the property in December. As part of the redesign, Yahoo also cut down on the ad load in Mail to provide a better overall user experience. In the short term, at least, that move has only added to the company’s ad woes.

Yahoo this week reported display ad revenue fell 11% in the first quarter, in part because of changes to the revamped home page and Yahoo Mail. The new tablet versions potentially allows for Yahoo to add more visually-focused ad formats to match the newsreader style of Yahoo Mail on the iPad or Android tablets. But that would have to be weighed against the goal of making the app more streamlined.