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When Apple debuted the iPhone 4 with a front-facing camera it toted along a killer app that had been unavailable on mobile devices until then - FaceTime. Now users could do video chat from mobile devices and Apple was the only player in the game with that capability.

Everybody else has been playing catch up. Skype quickly moved to add video chat, one of its staple products, and then added Qik Video Connect earlier this year. Now, Yahoo has gotten into the game with its new Yahoo Messenger app for iOS. The new Yahoo Messenger for iOS has been optimized for iPad and can do video and voice calls, text chat, presence, send SMS and share photos in real-time. Importantly, iPad 2 users can video chat to talk with PCs. As a communications app, it is a strong entry from forgotten source of innovation.

During a press conference today, Yahoo announced a large number of updates to Yahoo Mail, Search, and Messenger. Yahoo Mail, for example, will now feature status updates from a user's friends on its homepage. Yahoo Search will also receive a major redesign in the near future. Even though Yahoo will obviously switch to Microsoft Bing soon, Yahoo wants to align the look and feel of its homepage and search application. In the process, Yahoo will now also highlight more of its search services, including Search Monkey, right on its search results pages.

As of this moment, Yahoo! has no less than 4 iPhone-native applications in the iTunes app store. The latest is Yahoo! Messenger, which already was spotted on the original Yahoo iPhone application (our review here) as well as their mobile-optimized web site. This latest offering, though, is much more of a fully featured IM client for the Yahoo service.