PlusOne - Musings of a marketer

It is beginning to gain momentum - the blurring of web only and cross platform so mobile phones can access web with a degree of user-friendliness. The new free Opera Mini for mobiles is a step in the right direction.

As the blurb on their website says:

Opera Miniâ„¢ is a fast and easy alternative to Opera’s mobile browser, allowing users to access the Web on mobile phones that would normally be incapable of running a Web browser. This includes the vast majority of today’s WAP-enabled phones.

I must admit it attracted my interest. I sometimes browse the web on my cell phone and was interested to see what difference Opera’s product would make.

First off installation is easy. I downloaded it from their website onto my PC then BlueToothed the two file to my phone. Then just confirm your internet connection and you are away! There are options to send away an SMS code to get the WAP download URL, or you can navigate there using th URL mentioned on the site. The site I used to test the browser was the Australian Bureau of Meteorology page for radar images on the part of Australia I live in. This page has plenty of ordinary content, but a nice big radar image. Typically using my Nokia 3230 supplied browser this page takes an age to load. But with Opera’s browser it seemed much faster - and the rendition was improved as well. Text resizing was better. Like the Nokia browser, the page layout was reordered, but this was logical and neat.

This might be something to do with Opera’s small screen rendering. To quote Opera’s blurb on this

Opera’s Small-Screen Renderingâ„¢ technology intelligently reformats today’s Web sites to fit inside the screen width, thereby eliminating the need for horizontal scrolling….As an example, most news sites have a center column where the main article text is located. This column is usually 468 pixels wide (due to the standard ad-banner sizes) and the text is set to fill this width. This means that to read an article, you would have to scroll back and forth for every line of text. With Small-Screen Renderingâ„¢, the page is reformatted to fit inside the screen width and eliminate the need for horizontal scrolling. All the content and functionality is still available, it is only the layout of the page that is changed. This innovation is the key enabler for surfing on a mobile device.

One aspect that is different to Nokia’s browser is that the page is not displayed on the screen till it has been reconfigured on Opera’s servers. This means that when you see the page, it is all there. The reconfiguration on Opera’s servers means that the sizes of the pages delivered are reduced.

So what does this mean for the average web designer? First up it means that many websites can now be successfully viewed without the site having to be built in a WAP style. Sure, some thought and testing to see how it displays needs to be done (lets face it, it still needs to be usable - a challenge still facing many website even today) but essentially it is now narrowing the gap.

Will Opera’s new platform take hold? They have put some effort into developing some developer’s guides that allows some relatively easy hacks to style sheets to allow the browser to optimally display web pages. The question will be how excited developer’s get about it and read it.

And what about web site owners? To be honest I think that there is a real future in mobile access of web content. The common mindset is web is accessed via computers, but over time it is my belief that this will change. Just as with all new technology, there is some real opportunity for those who adopt fast and build a solid position in the mobile web world. The need to access information anywhere, any time is already with us.

Used Opera’s browser, or developed pages that are optimised for it or looking for opportunities? - let me know via comments

More reading on Opera Mini
Opera Mini released for mobile phones
Opera Mini Lanched (Treo Blog)
Comment on Arve Bersven’s blog

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opera mini
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