Mobile Browsers: Opera
Opera has come up with a way to jam regular Web pages onto the small screen that really seems to work. Opera's software converts what you see on a PC screen into a single narrow column of text and shrunken photos. Scrolling through such a converted page on a new, big-screen cell phone is no problem. It's even easier on a PDA.
[Opera's] Von Tetzchner had a briefcase full of such devices -- a Linux-based Sharp PDA and brand-new (and very groovy looking) phone/PDA combos from Nokia and Sony Ericsson -- that all use Opera's browser. Sadly, none of them work in the U.S.
Waiting for Hilden ...
>> The Mobile Internet: It Ain't Over 'Til The Fat Lady Sings
Opera's impressive new browser solves the puzzle of fitting regular Web pages onto very small screens. Will the much-hyped boom in cellphone surfing finally follow?
Justin Fox
Fortune
October 18, 2002
A couple of years ago, business and tech journalists were expending obscene amounts of ink and html on the coming marriage of the Internet and the cell phone. This mobile Internet thing was gonna be huge, we wrote and wrote and wrote.
And then ... not much happened. A few million people in Japan did go nuts over something called i-mode, and a few million more Europeans and Asians became addicted to sending short text messages over their mobile phones. But that was about it. Especially in the U.S., mobile phones continued to be used mostly for talking. The Internet continued to be something you surf from your PC. There were a few cool in-between successes, like the BlackBerry. But as a rule, companies that planned to get rich off the convergence of cell phones and Internet instead got ever poorer.
Why was the mobile Internet such a bust? There are lots of explanations: Maybe we really don't want to be able to surf the Web from a park bench. Maybe the wireless companies totally botched things. Maybe the phones just weren't good enough.
On Thursday afternoon the CEO of a Norwegian company called Opera Software came by with a different explanation: It's not so much that letting people surf the Internet from their cell phones and PDAs has been a bust. It's that it hasn't happened yet. "The problem was that people weren't actually getting the Internet on their cell phones," says Jon S. von Tetzchner, who co-founded Opera in 1995. Instead, they were getting bastardized versions like i-mode and WAP (it stands for wireless application protocol) that required people to design special pages just for cell phones. In Japan that worked. But in the rest of the world, the version of the Internet available on cell phones remained a sparsely populated and unappealing place.
But now Opera, which made its name (if not its fortune) with a fast, elegant Internet browser for PCs, has come up with a way to jam regular Web pages onto the small screen that really seems to work. Through some magical, mystical process that I can never hope to understand -- although I could try to fake it by throwing the word "heuristics" around a lot -- Opera's software converts what you see on a PC screen into a single narrow column of text and shrunken photos. Scrolling through such a converted page on a new, big-screen cell phone is no problem. It's even easier on a PDA.
Von Tetzchner had a briefcase full of such devices -- a Linux-based Sharp PDA and brand-new (and very groovy looking) phone/PDA combos from Nokia and Sony Ericsson -- that all use Opera's browser. Sadly, none of them work in the U.S., so I was only able to look through Web pages he'd downloaded back home. But I was still impressed.
So now that we've all forgotten about that coming mobile Internet boom, it may actually be about to burst upon us. "This is going to happen," says von Tetzchner. Compared with two or three years ago, he adds, "There is less hype, but more action." <<
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