Y! Finance Review

I want to review at least one app a week, and I wasn't sure what I was going to review this week. But last night when I was running Egg!, I started to see some different advertisements and one of them was for Y! Finance. I clicked the ad and before I knew it I was downloading this on my iPhone. Now normally, I want to review something that I think a lot of people would find useful and enjoy, so a finance app doesn't quite fit the bill. In fact, if I had not stumbled across it, this app would not be on my iPhone (blasphemy for an MBA grad). I have to say, I was very impressed with the design of the app and that is why I am reviewing it here.

This is the summary screen of the app. It gives you a quick look at some of the important things finance people like to look at (DJ, S&P, Nasdaq), and just below some of the top stories. This is the least exciting part of the app, so stay with me. If you tap the small black bar at the bottom, there are a number of options to customize what you see on this summary screen.

Under the quotes section, this is what we see. You can have a bunch of different companies that you want to follow. If you hold down on one, you have the 3 options pictured (Remove, Move, Resize). To move a company, you'll see these blue dots appear, and you tap the dot that represents the position you want to move to. This wasn't obvious to me at first. Initially, I thought the blue dots were anchors and tried to drag them to a new position. As for Resizing, there are 3 options (Compact, Graph, Details). The Apple Inc. box shows the detailed view with the graph and news article headlines below it. The others companies shown are in the compact option, and the graph option is just like the detailed one without the news headlines.

I found this screen by accident, while I was putting my iPhone down. If you turn your iPhone sideways while you're in the quotes tab, you get this sexy graph that lets you compare up to 3 different stocks or indices. You can scroll through all stocks/indices that you are following.

If you tap on a company from the normal quotes tab, it takes you to a detailed view where you can rotate your iPhone for a detailed graph of that company's stock performance. Here you can choose different time scales for the chart, similar to what you see on Yahoo Finance and Google Finance websites. Swiping along the bottom half of the screen lets you swap between news, performance indicators, and industry/competitors. I've shown the performance indicators here.

The last two bits are the Research and Tech Ticker tabs. As you can see the Research tab offers up a wealth of information and allows you to import your own My Yahoo! Portfolios. This is nice, if you have a lot of stocks that you're following and have them setup in Yahoo. It's even smart enough to know if you've already imported a company's ticker and tells you how many new companies were imported and how many you tried to import that were already there. The Tech Ticker tab features videos from the Yahoo Finance portal on current events in business.

I don't follow BlackBerry or Android too much, so I don't know what Yahoo offers on those platforms. But this is the first iPhone app that blew me away. If you have even a passing interest in finance or stocks, or if you want to see how the funds in your 401K are doing, get this app. (It's free).

From a developer's perspective, this app does a great job organizing the enormous amount of financial information in the marketplace and making it easy for users to navigate that information. Yahoo does a great job of customizing their app in a way that builds their own brand image. When you use it, you know it's a iPhone app, but it doesn't look like every other iPhone app out there. This is THE killer app on in the iPhone for finance. It's amazing how far we've come. It used to be that you would have to sit at your computer to get this kind of financial information. Now, it is available at your fingertips wherever you are.

Overal Rating:

I don't expect to give out 5 stars too often, but the information and the way this app presents that information is amazing!