Yahoo launches Mail app for iPad, Android tablets

Yahoo on Thursday released a Mail app for iOS and Android tablet users and a Weather app for iPhone owners.

A Yahoo Mail app has already been in play for the iPhone and Android smartphones, but the new version takes advantage of the larger screen size of tablets. A full-screen reading mode lets you flip through your e-mail messages as if you were reading a magazine.

Flipping through messages this way feels so much more natural than having to tap on each e-mail in the inbox to read it, especially on a tablet. It's an innovative and welcome approach, one I'd like to see pop up in other e-mail clients.

While in full-screen reading mode, tapping on the tablet displays a toolbar from which you can reply to or forward the current message, send it to the trash, move it to a folder, or add a star to mark it as important. All of the "starred" messages are sent to a specific folder where you can review them all in one shot.

The Yahoo Mail app now also supports more languages, including Romanian, Thai, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Dutch, Swedish, Greek. It can be downloaded from Apple's App store and Google Play.

Yahoo's new Weather app, which is available for the iPhone, kicks off by displaying the present temperature of your current location with a picturesque photo in the background.

Swiping up displays the forecast for the week, followed by full details on your local weather and a map of your area. Swiping to the left reveals the weather in other locations already set up in the default iOS weather app. You can easily edit this list to add or remove locations from around the world.

I have to confess that I'm not much of a weather buff. I pretty much just peek outside to see what the current weather is like. But the forecast details and the stunning photos in Yahoo Weather may prompt me to check the weather a bit more often on my iPhone.