Yahoo! has decided to take another step forward towards the goal of implementing its services on the mobile communications market. The company from Sunnyvale has announced, together with its partner Sprint, the launch of a new Wi-Fi e-mail service, for only $3 a month.

In this way, Sprint's customers owning Sprint PCS Multimedia MM A700 phones by Samsung, the MM 7400 and 5600 versions by Sanyo and Sprint PCS Vision Smart Device Treo 600 and 650 from PalmOne will be able to manage their Yahoo! Mail accounts directly from their mobile phones. This service is not a new one, but with the premium version also comes the possibility of storing e-mails directly on the mobile phones and then accessing them even if a network connection is not available at the moment.

This initiative from Sprint, to offer a premium version of an already-free existing service is consistent with the explosive growth of wireless communications, as stated by John Syers, director of communication services at Sprint, when referring to data services "Once again, this adds another brick to the building that people keep discussing that's rising around the world of voice".

Through this service, the Webmail portal goes beyond the relatively limited field of desktop computers and into a much broader one, that of mobile telephony, as stated by Thad White, director of mobile products at Yahoo: "It fits into the broader strategy of expanding ( Yahoo's ) relationship on the desktop to the mobile phone". The greatest advantage Yahoo! will obtain from this partnership will be an improvement of its image, because the free-downloadable interface will resemble closely that on the internet, which is already very familiar to many users.