News from two search giants today: Google’s unveiled its first mobile application, a J2ME application for its maps and local search services, while Yahoo will team up with its DSL partner SBC to sell a Yahoo-branded Nokia mobile phone. The Google news is straightforward; Yahoo’s is a little more complex. First of all, though the phone will use Cingular’s network, it’s a deal between Yahoo and Cingular parent SBC, not the mobile carrier itself. It’s as if SBC is routing around Cingular for mobile data and online services — a pretty damning indicator, perhaps, of how it thinks the operator is performing in those areas. It’s not an MVNO, but it’s about as close as you can get: Cingular supplies the pipe, but Yahoo provides the services and access to peoples’ existing Yahoo accounts, email and IM. SBC’s relegated Cingular to being the dumb pipe, which is really curious, considering that’s exactly what mobile operators have been fighting against for some time.

This also appears to be the summation of the ever-growing Nokia-Yahoo relationship. The two said back in April they were working together on mobile search apps, and then a couple months ago, one of Nokia’s UI and software bigwigs left the company and joined Yahoo. Again, the combination of these two companies is dangerous for mobile operators — with Yahoo services tightly integrated on a Nokia phone, customers won’t really care where they buy their service. The differentiation comes from Yahoo, not from the operator, whose voice and data service is relegated to an interchangeable commodity.

Google’s new application is pretty much what you’d expect, a J2ME front end for Google Maps with Google Local search functions built in. While Google’s had mobile search services that use SMS, WAP and XHTML for some time, this is its first standalone app, and as such, should serve as a wake-up call for them in some ways. First is the problem of interoperability among particular handsets and mobile operators. The application officially supports a number of handsets on Cingular, Sprint and T-Mobile, but Google says it should work on “most Java-enabled phones”, but of course users are already saying they can’t get it to work on their device or carrier. This is a huge problem for content providers offering standalone apps — unless the program’s been optimized for every handset and/or carrier, fragmentation, and consequently supporting all the users, is a nightmare, and asking the average user to troubleshoot a mobile data application and/or connection is asking way too much. And, of course, if something doesn’t work the first time, people won’t come back to it.

The two announcements also reflect the companies’ vastly different strategies on mobile. Google is all about the open internet. Its deals with carriers (such as with T-Mobile for the Web’n'Walk service in Europe. None of its mobile services are exclusive to any carriers (barring technical reasons like walled gardens), and while Yahoo does have some open services, it’s really gone down the carrier path to get its IM application installed on phones and its services offered through carrier portals. The end goal for them? Having customers more concerned about having a “Yahoo phone” than a phone from Cingular or T-Mobile or Vodafone. They’re not necessarily interested in keeping users inside a walled garden; but they want to make sure that there’s a Yahoo garden for people to play in that works across the wired and mobile internet, and that users will be more attached to that garden and the content and services inside than to their operator, or perhaps even to the manufacturer of their phone.

It’s an interesting bet — after all, a phone is about access to services. What good would a RAZR or Nokia 8800 be if it couldn’t connect to the PSTN? They’d be nice examples of industrial design, but pretty useless otherwise. Yahoo’s hoping to convert its millions of IM and email users into Yahoo Mobile customers by offering them tighly integrated (and controlled) access to those services which they already use and are already familiar with. The access to those services then becomes the key differentiator, since you can get voice and data from any carrier, but the special Yahoo experience only from Yahoo.