Atilla

Yes, yes, yes! The OLPCs have arrived. 209 kilograms of them, 100 lean-mean-green-machines.

It's superb. It awfully, criminally cute. White-and-green, extremely tiny - it was a lot smaller than I expected. The battery clicked in, I pressed the power button and it started working. Oddly enough, I've no problems with the Sugar interface. It's right as it should be, for the purposes of this laptop. It also blends perfectly with the look and feel of this little gem.

The screen is, as expected - superb. It's got an amazing detail for its tiny size. Not that tiny, considering that other "simmilar" solutions provide even smaller screens. Honestly, I don't think anything below this will be usable. Then it's the magical monochrome mode. Turn the light all the way down - hello, my perfect e-book reader. It works brilliantly under direct sunlight. And if you think that this is not important - you should go out more. The screen rotates, with the touch of a button. It's the most awesome of awesome.

I finally have a machine with a decent camera too. It works and it takes pictures. I will share some here, ASAP. It also has a mic and speakers built-in, so it's a fully functional communications agent, out of the box. Small box, with a power supply in it and a 1-page instruction manual. That's all you get.

The keyboard is strangely cute. Soft rubber keys, spill-resistant, what more to ask from it. Yes, you could whine about the size of the keys, or that sometimes you don't feel if you really pressed one of them or not. But they work with no big issues for me - I'm typing this from my OLPC. I wanted this blog to come from the small green machine.

It's just so cool. In the true spirit of geekness - I'm using Opera's special OLPC edition on it. I also have emacs and mplayer on it already. I watched a movie on it last night, with no issues whatsoever. Coding in the sun will be fun too. This is definitelly going to be my favourite plane toy. It's small and easy and it does anything I want. Its schoolbag, or lunchbox, looks will draw attention for sure. I want to see how people react to it, I'm sure that I'll be getting a lot of questions.

All of us will - the 60+ recepients from Opera Software and the rest of the lucky 100 that get to share the fun of this priceless little gem. Detailed updadtes for our progress in hacking into it are sure to follow.

So we've released Opera Link. Finally. It's a little bit of a beta, in various parts of the chain, but it works.

Despite posting information and explanations on various places though, I've come to realize that quite a lot of people will fail to understand what exactly is it that we're trying to give them and how they would be using it. Maybe, just maybe, if I could dedicate some careful explanation time, people would get what the point is.

Opera Link is a vision. A vision of the unified experience that Opera provides on the web. In the classic buzz-word-worthy "Anything Anywhere Anytime" sense of the word. Why would your Opera be different for you in the different places you're using it at? What good is any browser to you if what you're used to is not available to you? What tool is good for you if your style is not available to you? An experienced emacs user is extremely effective on his own setup. If you take him in front of Elicpse ... well .. sure - it's a good development environment and all that, but without his .emacs file he'll be far far away from his usual efficiency. And I'm not even talking about how uncomfortable he would feel.

So there you have it - a vision, that starts simple - bookmarks and speeddial and personal bar settings. You might argue that it's not the most brilliant things to sync, or that similar things already exists. Well yes - *similar* things do exist. But the same? Well, let's hope not exactly the same .

What Opera Link does is to dynamically and continuously synchronize the changes in your browsing environment between devices and platforms. As many as you want, as many as you would like. The web is everywhere - it's not just in your home or work desktop machine - it's on your laptop, your mobile phone, the terminal device on the airport, your TV, console device, public kiosk, at your friends' place... Why would you be denied the comfort you have created for yourself when you are moving around?

You should not be denied that comfort, you should not feel awkward, because the key bindings have moved, because your buttons and menus, that do magic for you, are simply not there. You should not be bothered and neither should I. Truth to be told, I never used bookmarks before the first internal builds with Link came out, but now I've over a hundred. And bookmarks are far away from a killer feature, excluding the fact that you have them in your Opera Mini immediately, which is just great.

One of the nice things that happen is that we're doing the changes on-the-fly, as your systems are working. There's no migration dialogs, no questions asked, the service just does exactly what you do, but on all your systems. You delete a bookmark - the damn thing will be gone from all systems. You add that important link to that guide online - it's there for you when you go home. It's there for you when you need to check the instructions while you're on the move, with your mobile. And all your convenience and experience will be there. Because no matter how much you pretend the opposite, you're bound to the environment you're slowly creating for yourself. And if you aren't - you should be. Because you can.

There's been a number of voices raised about the fact that Opera Link pokes the servers every once in a while to see that things are still the same way the browser thinks them to be. Couldn't the client be notified about what it needs to know? Well - the answer is yes, and it probably must be. Guess how your Mini gets all changes made on the desktop browser instantaneously. I'd rather have compatibility mode implemented first though. And that one will pass through everything and just work. And it does, at minimal cost.

I'm waiting for the day in which Link will give me the comfort I require, where ever I require it. And I'll work on making it happen. Because I am user number two