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A Swedish wolf in Norway

Miscellaneous technobabble from a Swede in Norway.

Posts tagged with "opera mini"

Mobile Internet revolution…delayed?

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Digi writes that there is almost zero growth in the usage of Internet on mobile phones. A representative from NetCom, the TeliaSonera-owned second largest mobile phone carrier in Norway, is cited saying that the traffic on their flatrate subscriptions, “Connect”, tripled last year, while use on their regular subscriptions is more or less standing still.

Well, it isn’t very surprising, considering that they still charge 20 NOK (about 2.50€) to a megabyte for their regular subscription plans, the price has been at the same level for the last ten years, while rates for regular phone calls or text messages has dropped significantly. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the data charges are expensive, just downloading the front page of a normal on-line newspaper (not the mobile version) would cost 20-40 NOK, and watching a video clip on your mobile phone will probably ruin you. Add to that if you happen to do this while roaming abroad, where data rates often are ten times or more.

I am switching over from NetCom to OneCall this month. Their data rates are a quarter of NetCom’s, so I might actually use Opera on my mobile more than just to load the very-lightweight WAP version of the Oslo route planner, and while using a local hotspot somewhere. I also use Opera Mini every now and then when I want to read a site that where surfing with images off (as I do in the regular Opera Mobile) doesn’t work very well, but that costs a bit as well.

Beta of Opera Mini “Dimension”

The beta of Opera Mini 4, codename “Dimension” is available now for high-end (MIDP 2) Java phones. It allows you not only to surf the full web the way that has been proven the best, using Opera’s award-winning Small Screen Rendering technique that reformats any page into a single column, but also allows you to switch to a zoomed-out desktop-like rendering mode, where you can get an overview of the page and zoom into any particular piece of information you want to read.

Personally, I live and swear by the Small Screen Rendering, but who am I to say what is best for you. That’s why there are options. It’s a free download, so go grab a copy and give it a test spin.

Opera Mini 3.0 out now


The beta period is over, Opera Mini 3.0 is now available for download, almost as an early birthday present for me. If you have a Java MIDP-capable mobile phone, this is the application you should have installed. Opera Mini gives you access to the full web on almost all mobile phones, at least the ones with Java and data support, and not just a small subset as some seem to prefer.

Among the new features in version 3.0 is that it can use an secure connection when communicating with the Opera Mini server, which makes it a lot harder to eavesdrop, and the support for web feeds.

Even though my mobile phone came with Opera Mobile pre-installed, I often use Opera Mini as well, the two complement each other beautifully. Now, if I could only figure out how to disable the extreme paranoia mode on it, which requires me to actively allow Opera Mini to connect to the Internet every time. I have found the setting to disallow it every time, but that wasn't quite what I was looking for…

Don’t believe the .mobi hype

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Opera CEO says DotMobi is a ‘total waste of time’
“There should be one Internet,” he says. “What if you're using another device? Should we have .gameconsole? .car? .fridge? .plane? We don't need .mobi at all.” Besides, he says, “There are capabilities for sites to query the browser to figure out exactly what you're using. That's a much more elegant solution than having the user choose which site to go to.”

No revolutionary changes in the world of mobile browsing this week

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This week, Opera Software has released two interesting updates to its product portfolio. First out was Opera Mini 2.0 (read more in Eskil’s blog). Unfortunately, I still have a phone that only does the MIDP 1 flavour of Java, which means that I can only use the “lo-fi” version, and that version doesn’t really have many big changes in it (and it still shows all the pages with a Courier font, which is very annoying). Still, it’s probably worth an update

The other update was Opera 8.60 for Symbian series 60 (read more in Gerður’s blog). I have Opera installed on my phone already, but since my MIDP 1 phone is a Sony Ericsson P800, which is running Symbian UIQ, it cannot use a version for Symbian series 60. So I’m stuck with version 6.31, which is starting to feel a bit outdated, but however does work fine for looking up bus times, which is what I mainly use it for (and directory lookups).

So, for me, there are no revolutionary changes in the world of mobile browsing this week. I am, however, planning to buy a P990, which will come with version 8 of the Opera browser and which does support MIDP 2 to run the “hi-fi” version of Opera Mini. I only hope it will be out soon, it has already been delayed from the initial March release date they first promised…
August 2008
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