Wednesday, 20. June 2007, 12:19:54
Even though I am primarily involved in Opera Desktop, I am very happy to see the success the Opera Mini team is having with their
new baby. It's certainly raising a few eyebrows out there, and overall, people seem to love it.
This launch has not been without controversies, though. Our little
Apple spoof ad has
ruffled a few feathers out there.
One thing they are getting caught up in is that the spoof ad is comparing software (Opera Mini) to hardware (iPhone), but I don't think they are getting the point. Opera Mini is available right now, and can be used on almost any phone. You don't need a $600 device to browse the full Web on your mobile phone.
I'll quote
Mobility Now:
This is a revolutionary product. It’s bigger than the iPhone. Why? Because over one billion people currently use a cellphone, and are restricted to browse only WAP pages because they don’t have a smartphone. Yet the vast majority support Java, and by downloading this simple 200k program, they can now browse the full Internet with a desktop like experience, right now, for free.
Another issue I've seen brought up a few times is that the overview mode and zooming in Opera Mini 4 is a ripoff of the iPhone browser. To be fair, I won't get into how Apple claimed to do full mobile browsing first. Let's instead look at the assumption that Apple invented zooming and panning in Web browsers...
While a lot of people may not be aware that Nokia has been doing this for quite some time with their new mobile browser, it is slightly more surprising that they are unaware that the Wii browser (Opera!) also gives you an overview mode where you can choose to zoom in on specific parts of the page. The DS browser also does similar things, and even Microsoft's experimental, er, "Web site image viewer"
Deepfish starts zoomed out, and allows you to zoom in to view interesting content in more detail.
I am sure that iPhone will be a wonderful device, but it will also be "wonderfully" expensive, and out of reach to a lot of people. And while Apple is bragging about zooming and panning in their mobile browser, the rest of us can simply use one of the many browsers on various devices that do this already. And if you have a Java enabled phone, you would most likely be able to install Opera Mini, which means that you won't have to buy a new phone to get the full Web in your pocket, right now.
WIDGETIZE