While the rising Yahoo of the 1990s only lives in our memories, its name and branding continue to have zombie-like effects on other products from its owner Verizon – this time the ZTE Blade A3Y, an exclusive phone for Yahoo Mobile that bears the namesake firm's familiar shade of purple.
Aside from the pop of color, ZTE's 5.4-inch 720p phone mostly shows off the Yahoo heritage on your homescreen. It contains a cluttered collection of helpful pre-installed Yahoo apps like the ad-free Yahoo Mail Pro (yes, Yahoo Mail usually comes with ads). , Yahoo Weather and Yahoo News. On the purple back of the phone is a fingerprint sensor to unlock the device, an 8 megapixel camera, and a detachable back plate to access the phone's battery. There is a USB-C port on the bottom of the phone to charge the battery.
The Blade comes with Android 10, which is powered by a MediaTek quad-core 2.0 GHz processor in the lower price range and 2 GB of RAM. The phone won't surprise anyone with speed, and storage space is minimal too. It starts at 32 GB and can be expanded up to 2 TB with a microSD card. With these lower-cost, less-exciting parts, the Blade comes in at a bargain price of $ 49.99.
Yahoo Mobile joined Visible in March as another MVNO from Verizon, offering the same unlimited (on behalf) plan of $ 40 per month. This is the operator's first exclusive phone since its launch earlier this year and in its own way perfectly captures Yahoo's degraded state in 2020.
A branded budget phone is just the latest entry in Yahoo's long journey from being a web service titan to being a Verizon slap. The telecommunications giant bought the company's branding, email service, and advertising technology in 2016, and prompted the company's remaining search engine, forum, and blog sections to try to rename themselves Altaba. Verizon later combined Yahoo with AOL to create Oath, which after multiple data breaches and privacy issues resulted in a write-off of the carrier's purchase of the two companies and another renaming to Verizon Media.
All of these steps pale in comparison to Yahoo: one of the first places many people visited on the internet and a dominant search engine in a pre-Google era. ZTE's Blade A3Y isn't the old Yahoo and actually just has its color, but it's fun to remember what it was. The phone is available now at an introductory price of $ 49 on Yahoo Mobile.
