Nokia & Yahoo: The tired and the very tired?

Rumours have been hitting the airwaves — well, the internet-waves, anyway — of an impending announcement from Nokia and Yahoo next week. Alex over at PhoneDog picked up the story along with TechCrunch, both pointing out that AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher reckons the big announcement will feature Yahoo and Nokia getting into bed.

The TechCrunch post gives a little more detail:

According to Kara Swisher’s sources, Yahoo will be announcing a deal with Nokia that will build Yahoo email, search, and other applications into their devices. At first glance, this is a very big deal. Nokia, after all, is still by far the largest mobile phone maker in the world.

Yahoo is tired, very very tired. Their email is a piece of shit — indeed I’ve had to stop using it because, well, I’ve had too much email. It’s completely unusable. This is despite paying the $25 or whatever it was for a premium account. Utter rubbish. (I made the mistake of using it as a backup for my main mail account. The system generates an error when I try and search 250,000 emails. Ridiculous.)

Yahoo almost got it with Yahoo Go, years ago — when they created a native application for Nokia devices that integrated all their services into a nicely designed app. Everything from photos to contacts to email. It really was a super building block. Then, of course, they canned the service, turning the next versions into a series of mobile web links.

Total bollocks.

A quick glance across the Yahoo Mobile page reveals a few interesting offers — Yahoo Mail on your Nokia, Yahoo’s iPhone app, Yahoo’s BlackBerry App and Flickr for iPhone. Not bad, not bad. Nothing that’s causing me to lean forward with interest or excitement though.

Yahoo and Nokia together is a highly unfortunate match. Indeed I’m even more skeptical of Nokia’s future than I was 2 weeks ago at the moment, especially after Android’s ridiculous gains recently.

I look forward to seeing what the two firms can jointly vomit out the door — but I most definitely am sitting here with arms crossed not looking impressed. I hope it’s not just a ‘all Nokias will now default to Yahoo Search’ announcement too.