Barely scratching the surface

Yesterday Opera and T-Mobile Europe announced that T-Mobile will launch a new web'n'walk community service build on My Opera. The press release stated that:

By integrating the community into their product offering, T-Mobile allows its customers to take advantage of popular My Opera features such as photo-blogging, photo albums and more, all from the convenience of their web'n'walk powered phones.

I believe it's time to step back and look at our collaboration with T-Mobile. T-Mobile and Opera have been working closely together now for more than two years, and T-Mobile made headlines in June 2005 with the launch of web'n'walk. On its debut, T-Mobile became one of the first operators to offer real Internet browsing on a mobile phone, with unrestricted access to all content. For many years, the prevailing wisdom was that control of the content (the so-called 'walled garden'), was the best method to drive operator revenues from data. T-Mobile and their customers disagreed.

Too expensive, too complicated, too little used — that’s our clients' judgment about our current data services, - Ulli Gritzuhn, T-Mobile.

T-Mobile launched a number of Opera powered handsets like Nokia 6680, 6630 and N70, but they also understood these high-end mobile devices would reach only a niche market, primarily because of price. To address this they chose Opera Mini for the mass market Java enabled mobile phones. The first results came in at the close of the third quarter of 2005. After web'n'walk's launch in June 2005, the indications for an increased data usage as well as data ARPU were very promising. On average, web'n'walk customers visited 330 Internet pages per month. These raw numbers corresponded to a 489% increase in data volume per user, and 119% increase in data ARPU. After introducing several Opera Mini based web'n'walk phones at the end of the second quarter 2006 and Internet usage surged 350% while revenues jumped an additional 70%.
This evidence showed that walled gardens did not keep customers and revenue in; they held revenues back. And that is a very interesting observation I will need to get back to later.
Meanwhile, I suggest all those who haven't tried photo blogging with Opera Mini to test it out. It supports lots of web services like MySpace and Flickr, or check out recently added photos to the Opera Mini photo stream.

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.

Opera is working on making version 9 ready for mobile phones. One of the developers in the Symbian team in Opera recently posted a screenshot of Opera 9 showing the very advanced ACID2 test from WebStandards.org. The test was first passed by Safari from Apple before Opera passed it on desktop in March 2006. Opera for mobile is based on exactly the same rendering engine as the desktop browser and such all the good stuff will become available on millions of phones and other devices soon.

This is great news for web standards and for web developers!

Long live the web!