Barely scratching the surface

This has been a week full of exciting events. It started on Monday with the release of Opera 9.1, which included the new real-time Faud Protection. Opera's Fraud Protection utilizes back-ends from both GeoTrust and PhishTank to ensure the best possible protection for the end users.



On Wednesday I had (thanks to Håkon) the very pleasant first encounter with the $100 laptop from the OLPC project. I would like to send a special christmas greetings to the people working on this project - keep on doing good!

The mobile team had also a great week here at Opera and announced on Thursday that Samsung will be using Opera Mobile in their upcomming mobile phones.



Today we are very proud to release the preview of the Opera browser for the beautiful white Wii (I believe our CTO was up 2am this morning). The browser features some very unique innovations like the new Intelligent Zoom. This enables users to simply point the Wii Remote at the area of interest on the screen and Opera will automatically adapt the zoom level to fit the area. The browser will for example provide a different zoom level when reading an article on BBC than it will when logging in to Gmail. The feature is really great and its crucial for the user experience since TVs have much lower resolutions than today's PC monitors. Now I just need to get hold of a Wii - Perhaps I should make a Widget?

Happy x-mas browsing everyone - and long live the web!

Would you like to get personalized and always updated newsfeed directly on the idle-screen of your mobile phone? How about location based traffic information or a map service similar to Google Maps? This is what Opera, Telenor and FAST set out to test in a R&D study named 'Aida' earlier this year. The solution was tested on a large number of end users over many months and was very well received among the testers. Check out the video below from the solution running live on a Windows Mobile phone.

If you have problems understanding the text on the screen, it's most likely because it is in Norwegian

Some days ago, TomSoft wrote an article discussing a few myths of the 'mobile Ajax'. I think many (including myself) share Thomas' view that it's important not to hype technologies, and that its important not to draw conclusions like 'the mobile web 2.0 equals mobile AJAX' (meaning that AJAX is something running in the browser). The Web 2.0 is a much broader term, and limit it to a single set of technologies does not make sense. He is also correct when stating the there are alternatives currently deployed on lots of mobile phones and that mobile AJAX is not a way to bypass the operators. In fact most of the interest in the world for Mobile AJAX solutions derives from Operators who are interested in superior user experiences across devices and medias.

What I question is the following:

Looks good, but unfortunately, I have no Ajax enabled browser out of the thousands of handsets we have here at MobileScope….

How you manage to have thousands of phones without an AJAX capable browser? Opera Mobile is estimated to ship on approximately 46 different handset model in 2006 and Nokia ships their new web browser on a significant model. This means that there are already millions of AJAX enabled mobile phone in the market.

Seems that the Write Once Run Anywhere myth is back!! It was actually already not achievable through technology designed for this, so I did not see how Ajax app (which is basically designed for one or two platform) will be able to address suddenly thousands of different platforms…..

I haven't heard anyone claim this anywhere. But we are in Opera reusing lots and lots of AJAX solutions on other devices than it was originally designed for. Whether SoonR in their demo reused any code from their PC version is not sufficient to argue otherwise.

As for Li Mikas comment in his blog:

So finally... OPERA mobile AJAX platform got themselves a partner... SOONR.com to develop a mobile ajax app running on their OPERA platform

This has nothing to do with Opera Platform. It's a standard AJAX application, that just happens to be running on a mobile phone rather than a PC. Opera Platform on the other hand is a full AJAX framework for creating user interfaces and applications with.

Summing up. The discussion points Thomas brings forward are very valid, but there is a clear difference between advocating for which technologies will succeed in the future and which ones are available today.

I have been writing a lot about dotmobi lately, asking for people to wake up and smell the coffee.
David Meyer from ZDNet seems to agree.

It's not going to make it any easier to access the content — in fact it will add a couple of keystrokes to what you're doing

- Windsor Holden, senior analyst with telecommunications consultancy Analysys

You don't need a separate domain to do that...Another mobile industry attempt to control something that's uncontrollable — another quasi-walled garden

- James Enck, analyst with Daiwa Securities

I'm sure more will follow.

Link to article

A lot of the new domain names just compound the problem of trademark infringement and fraud.

- Sarah Deutsch, associate general counsel for Verizon.

...A senior lawyer at Verizon Communications, the second-largest US telecommunications group, said there was no 'particular business need' for 'dotmobi' and the company had only registered verizon.mobi to prevent others taking it... web developers said there was no technical benefit to using 'dotmobi', as websites could be designed to adapt to mobile phone screens...

Looks like the lawyers are awake. Wonder when the technologist will join in.