Choose Opera

As we announced in the press release on May 8th, 2008, Sony selected Opera 9.5 SDK for Devices to power its new digital photo frame.

I had a chance to bring the device “Canvas Online CP-1” to Oslo and show it to our CEO, Jon von Tetzchner. He used the brand new digital photo frame delivered with the Opera browser.

The device has a built-in RSS feed reader that is a usual path to open the bundled Opera browser. When Jon clicked on an RSS feed (sure, that was an RSS feed from Choose Opera ), a cool splash screen popped up with the Opera logo and a message saying "Opera Powered". Jon smiled and said "It's awesome".

Currently the device is sold only in the Japanese market therefore the whole user interface is in Japanese except for the buttons on top of frame. Even though Opera’s CEO could not understand the Japanese menus on the screen, he quickly mastered the way to browse without reading the manual.

Inside the device he easily found the software keyboard necessary for typing web addresses. He also tried entering URL to his favorite web site using a joystick behind the frame as well as typing it with a remote control. These controllers are very useful not only for typing URLs, but also enable selecting a link on a web page with Opera's Spatial navigation feature.

I asked him about his impression and his response was "It has lots of nice features. It has a very good screen, good for browsing. I am visiting a lot of my favorite pages obviously."

When I asked if he would like to buy the device he replied "Yes! I have to have a lot of gadgets, right? So it would fit very well into my collection of gadgets at home."

For Opera's CEO, browsing on the Sony digital photo frame is a real pleasure.

Footage of the his browsing experience with the device