Opera, Microsoft, and the Mobile Browser Market 245
DrEspenA writes "Salon has an interesting article on the competition for the mobile phone browser market. Ostensibly the article is about Microsoft's efforts to dominate the market, but the key protagonist is really Opera Software, which may be gaining the (initial) upper hand simply because they are not Microsoft. Good discussion of whether standards and familiarity really is necessary in the mobile browser market."
Mobile browsers? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Mobile browsers? (Score:4, Interesting)
You want to walk around with a clunky 15" screen? Well, not me.
Re:Mobile browsers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Having said that, I don't think most mobile phones are good for web surfing. Reading short messages is ok, but massive amounts of text just do require painful amounts of scrolling on such a small display. Since I like to type, too, I'd rather go for a handheld like those Psion organizers, that have a landscape-oriented display with a fairly decent keyboard under it. If only their hardware wasn't incompatible with everyone else's (save for the styli and batteries) I would buy one (well, money is a concern, too). But that's not a phone, I know.
Anyway, more power to Opera. They've always delivered a great product, and although there seems to be a strong resistance to closed software from the hackers side, and a strong resistance against anything non-MicroSoft on the non-hacker side, I sincerely hope Opera doesn't go the way BeOS did, but either flourishes commercially or goes open-source before the bell tolls for them.
Re:Mobile browsers? (Score:2, Funny)
will make you feel like getting one.. i guess i gotta sell my liver.
why no choice? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:why no choice? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:why no choice? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:why no choice? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:why no choice? (Score:5, Insightful)
Storage isn't a problem.
Re:why no choice? (Score:3, Insightful)
At any rate, there needs to be that default browser or else nobody will want to buy it because it is too hard (perceptions count here) for people to set up if they have to select what they want. Why? Because they simply don't know what they want.
Re:why no choice? (Score:2)
Open Source? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Open Source? (Score:5, Informative)
What about Links? [mff.cuni.cz]
Re:Open Source? (Score:5, Interesting)
Only thing is, I bet the cell phone providers and manufacturers are getting paid to make sure that we can start viewing web ads on these phones ASAP.
Or is that just my paranoia talking?
Re:Open Source? (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually I don't think so. They have too much to lose:
First, mobile browsing is expensive. If my network provider stuffs my "browsing experience" with just one frigging add (for which I pay for) I'm off their network before they can say "herbal viagra".
Oh, you mean that I have no choice? Actually I have. I can chose not to mobile-browse at all (I have yet to see the usefulness of internet on the run) and use my mobile phone to make and receive calls only.
Re:Open Source? (Score:2, Informative)
IMO, there are a few good uses of the Internet on the run. I commute, as do many people, by train to work. During the 15 minute ride I have a few options:
I can look out of the window at houses and offices
I can try and make eye contact with the various passengers near to me
or I can visit various news sites using my mobile device and pass the time by reading interesting stories.
There can be a use for mobile browsing, but I believe that the devices will need to get better, and connectivity options (GPRS/WiFi) will also need to get cheaper.
Tim
Do we really want this? (Score:3, Insightful)
I have no desire to read Slashdot through my phone thanks. I need a decent screen. I may want occasional bits and pieces of information, but this will be very short pieces of info like news headlines. Internet cellphones simply try to do far too much, and be far too much like a desktop PC.
Re:Do we really want this? (Score:2, Informative)
You send a page that you want to a central server which parses and formats it. It then sends it back to your phone and boom...you get images, text, links and everything. I use it for my Handspring all the time and it downloads many of my favorite sites...of course I wish it could compact Slashdot further but I think Cmdr Taco may have to talk to the AvantGo people about it.
Re:Do we really want this? (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally, I'd want to be able to google anywhere, anytime. Imagine the largest human library in existance accessible from a device that sits in your pocket.
Re:Do we really want this? (Score:5, Funny)
Just so long as it has in large friendly letters "Don't Panic" on the cover.
Not me, but some might (Score:2)
I personally woudn't stand to have browse slashdot on my 4 square centimeter cellphone screen and most of the time I don't have use for it. However, what does happen is that when I'm really bored (or have to wait for a long time), I pull out my Psion Revo+ and download a complete comment page on Slashdot: hours of fun! Of course, the screen on my Psion is way larger than than a cellphone screen, but recent evolutions seem to integrate what we now know as PDA's and cellphones. This together with GPRS, could lead to more surfing on cellphones.
So the browser on the cellphone is important, not now, but we'll see it coming in the next years. And yes, on my Psion I use Opera and it rocks!
Re:Do we really want this? (Score:2, Insightful)
"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home." -- Ken Olson, President, Digital Equipment, 1977
Today, people are convinced that they need a computer (or more) in their home. You might not want this, but there are companies out there that would like this (a new market) and will try to create a "need" (new revenue stream).
Re:Do we really want this? (Score:4, Interesting)
By the way, Opera7.0 beta (Windows only) can be put into small creen mode. It is worth downloading if you have got reasonable bandwidth. The browser works very well for plain-vanilla HTML that I have tried. Screws up a bit on javascript pop-up menus. This migh well be welcone pressure back to clean, simple web pages designed to give you information instead of high-energy jazzy pages intended to impress you with the provider and his web designer without telling you anything.
but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, I suspect that there's going to be some small companies somewhere and all the providers are going to pick a different company and we're going to end up with 3 or 4 small companies that MS is just gonna buy out and gain the upper hand with.
Microsoft Will Win... (Score:4, Funny)
..If for nothing other than the fact they have a huge ad below this story =D.
nice (Score:2, Interesting)
OTOH, I really wonder why it is so difficult for M$ to rule the mobile market - can you remember when you first heard about Windows CE? Not much happened in all the years, although M$ is throwing a lot of money at it.
The fact that Microsoft made 'bloated' their main (Score:4, Funny)
It's probably difficult for Microsoft to rule the mobile-marked because they can't seem to find a cellphone with 256 MB of DDR-RAM and a 1 GHz CPU. Not to mention a physical-media like a harddrive for swapping when you are dialing long-distance numbers.
Re:The fact that Microsoft made 'bloated' their ma (Score:2, Funny)
Re:The fact that Microsoft made 'bloated' their ma (Score:2, Interesting)
Beep! Wrong answer. Here's what Google tells about this particular urban legend [google.com].
Re:The fact that Microsoft made 'bloated' their ma (Score:3, Interesting)
I've also seen the story used on TV news shoes being misrepresented as actual fact to demonstrate similarities between current corporate blunders and that.
Odd how urban legends become 'fact' isn't it?
Re:nice (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, I do work in embedded systems. Microsoft has already lost that market. On PDAs, they are still holding out pretty well, but in the long term I see them losing that, too.
Not just anti-Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not just anti-Microsoft (Score:4, Informative)
I guess they will (mainly) use the "Microsoft is an evil monopoly"-argument to convince the businness-guys and the other arguments for the tech guys.
Re:Not just anti-Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't think it might be because Opera's browser is more suited to mobiles because it's less bloated?
No, I think that "not Microsoft" is a very strong reason for Ericcson, Nokia, etc. to use Opera, even if the Microsoft solution was better.
As we all know, Microsoft has been very successful in the PC world. They bascially dictate to the PC manufacturers what to do to a huge extent - not just technically, but from a marketing perspective too. If, for instance, Dell wanted to sell a Harry Potter themed PC, Microsoft can say no (and have done). Do you think the mobile phone companies want to be in that situation? Do you think they want their products to become commodities with cut-throat margins upon which Microsoft add software with huge margins and upon which they can dictate the price?
I'm not saying this because I am an anti-Microsoft zealot, but because I can really see the business sense of the mobile phone companies not having anything to do with Microsoft. This is one of the biggest problems Microsoft currently faces - the market is moving away from PCs to smaller form devices, and the manufacturers don't want anything to do with Microsoft. This is why we will see Microsoft increasingly experimenting with it's own hardware, like the X-Box. Don't be suprised if you find a Microsoft branded mobile phone released sometime in the next couple of years.
Now! In selected European countries (Score:5, Informative)
Too late. It's [orange.ch] on the market since about a week in selected European countries.
The phone is manufactured for Microsoft and sold exclusively through a deal with Orange.
If it is a success, now that's a whole different question. I guess people prefer not having to reboot their phones.
Re:Now! In selected European countries (Score:2, Funny)
+ +
Your battery is low, please insert
a new one and reboot
[OK] [Cancel]
+ +
Re:Now! In selected European countries (Score:2)
I wonder, how MS manages to make prices THAT good
Re:Not just anti-Microsoft (Score:3, Informative)
Opera is just better period. Also not MS. (Score:2, Interesting)
So, in addition to being leaner, Opera is also impressing with superior results at displaying on small screens. The fact that it's not MS is just icing on the cake -- certainly not the main attraction.
Re:Not just anti-Microsoft (Score:2, Insightful)
I know that since the Microsoft courtcase everybody - both anti and pro MS people - have portraied Microsoft as an huge amassement of (evil or good) geniuses.
But let's face it: They are incompetent.
Microsoft is like some communistic state buerocracy. When the money keeps flowing in and nobodys job is at stake, there is not much incentive to work hard.
Of course Microsoft, the 40000 man company needs 10 times as long to fix a security bug than a 20-man company. Of course every project Microsoft that was started after the 80's and early 90's (like keyboards, mice, WinCE, MSN, MS Bob, Internet Explorer, PenWindows, Windows on non-x86, Hailstorm, XBox, etc.) was making big losses. Of course they did not innovate anything really new and instead just ripped off concepts from somewhere else (first the basic windowing system from Apple, now more advanced concepts like multiple desktops from the Unix GUI. Also the much-hyped tablet PC is nothing new and already existed and failed in the early 90's)
Microsoft is very powerful and rich. But they also became lazy, incompetent and slow. Everywhere, where Microsoft can't use their desktop domination to push a product, it is doomed to fail. - Simply because Microsoft is too slow and too expensive to create a competitive product that can survive on it's own. (Just look at XBox. It came out 2 years after Playstation2 (= too late), it features a short-term low numbers design for a long-term, mass produced project (off-the-shelf design where a custom design would fit best =stupid design), they are pumping about 200 million per quarter into it, and it still has fallen behind PS2 and Gamecube. Unlike Sony and Nintendo who have higher development costs and will sell so-and-so many units to break-even, Microosft will never break even. The more the sell, the deeper they get into the red. There is no hope for XBox, Microsoft may keep it alive for a few years until it's livetime is over, but XBox, the platform is doomed and there will be no XBox2. There is no way they can put out a product competing with PS3 at the sime time. First, because they already have choosen a stupid design and second because they are not very competent, especially in the gaming market.)
Re:Not just anti-Microsoft (Score:3, Interesting)
After 4 or 5 hours of going around and visiting the same sites, etc., the memory usage was around 15M for IE, 25M for Mozilla, and a whopping 35M for Opera.
Now, IE may be excused because a lot of the resources it uses are already factored into the rest of the system, but Opera using a whole 10M more than Mozilla is just unconscionable.
Re:Not just anti-Microsoft (Score:4, Informative)
Kinda makes sense, if you have ram, you might as well use it as a cache of pre-rendered pages (or whatever else they use ram for.) Notice how easy it is to press the back button 30 times in IE, then do it in Opera.
Re:Not just anti-Microsoft (Score:2, Insightful)
Also thought Von Tetzchner has a point with phones being about personal expression and style.
Give me speed first! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Give me speed first! (Score:3, Insightful)
... why would i need a browser when gprs is so expensive and slow?
Don't put the cart before the horse! Until there is widespread need for the speed there is no encouragement to the networks to invest in their infrasturcture. Take the internet as an example - its been slow and crap for year, but now the plebs want streaming movies broadband is breaking out all over the place...Re:Give me speed first! (Score:2)
Also, some Carriers use compression proxy servers, that can give you incredible speed, but you need to use the client software.
BTW, Why would I need a wireless phone? Phone booths are everywhere! Oh wait, that was 20 years ago...
Re:Give me speed first! (Score:2)
friend of mine used gprs when he was in tunisia and he was paying something like 1$ / kb. so price of gprs varies greatly depending in which country you are....
A smartphone needs familiarity, A cellphone not! (Score:5, Insightful)
Normal cellphones? (Score:5, Interesting)
Also games are very popular on cells too. While I do not see the appeal, many seem to. I bought the most "business-like" phone I found, yet it still comes with 3 games. It's getting pretty hard to find "just a cellphone" without all the bloat. Try to find me a cellphone without Games, Calendar, Downloadable songs, on-screen animations, WAP, iMode or anything that doesn't belong on a cellphone. Only a contact list, talking function and SMS function... Find me such a beast and I'll agree there still are "just cellphones".
Besides, don't forget the Japanese. They surely seem to love iMode and they fancy cellphones.
Re:A smartphone needs familiarity, A cellphone not (Score:2, Interesting)
It's asinine to talk about MS "familiarity" as a standard because MS is the antithesis of standards -- that's what they do -- take things which are standard, leverage its monopoly on the desktop to propogate incompatibility to fragment things, and then sit and then just hang out till everything's so fscked that everyone has to revert to whatever MS has got, with innovator's suffocated to the wayside.
More of a design issue (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:More of a design issue (Score:2)
The tabar would be redundant on mobiles as well, as who's going to do more than just read the news or mail on a mobile?
Of course, if a similar solution was to be implemented on mobiles you would have to require that the users learn the mouse gestures or something. And considering what technology imbeciles most users are, that's not going to happen. Again, the massed incompetance of people using technology gets in the way of the technology being efficent to use.
And I don't buy that "technology should be easy to use in the first instance" argument. It's like saying you should be able to drive cars from the first second you're strapped into the driver's seat. If people in general were willing to spend an hour or two (phones are MUCH easier to use than cars are. How many drving lessons did YOU need?) learning how something new works they would save more time than that in a week, never mind a year.
-Mark
Re:More of a design issue (Score:3, Funny)
Talking about mobile browsers (Score:5, Interesting)
ziproxy is a forwarding (non-caching) proxy that gzips text and HTML files, and reduces the size of images by converting them to low quality JPEGs. It is intended to increase the speed for dial-up Internet connections. Most browsers support gzipped content, so Web pages appear as normal, but as they are only a fraction of their original page size, pages are much quicker to load. Even for browsers that don't support it, hints how to overcome it using SSH port forwarding are included. Images are reduced in size by an average of one third, with only marginal visible image quality loss. It should be used with inetd/xinetd, but if you can't use them, a simple replacement "netd" is provided.
Re:Talking about mobile browsers (Score:2)
You can even choose the quality of the images you want and if you want images.
Re:Talking about mobile browsers (Score:2)
Yeah - I know. I am actually from Europe myself :) The reason why I took this to instant use is that this way I can set a personal proxy for this and have full control of it. I also think it should work quicker, as the performance of the proxy is not affected by others. But surely, there is need for the commercial ones too :)
Re:Talking about mobile browsers (Score:2)
A good idea would be to setup one in some high bandwith place (like at work, or at school) and then use it when you're dialing up normally. Best if it's on the other side of your personnal dialup system (well, not everybody can be its own ISP, but anyway)
Small screen rendering (Score:5, Informative)
Am I the only one that thought that this wasn't particulary unque? Hell, Lynx has been doing it with text for ages and AvantGo (with "display tables" turned off) does exactly the same thing.
Whilst the Opera guy may think that the browser war is hotting up (he's wrong, MS have won, everything else is relegated to the niche position and always will be - there are far too many Joe Blow users out there), they are definately onto a winner in the mobile arena.
Oh finally, for those that don't know, Sendo are not a well known manufacturer of mobile phones here in the UK. The reason being is that they don't sell under their own brand. Their business model is to create cheap network operator branded phones and for that, they do pretty well.
Re:Small screen rendering (Score:5, Informative)
This is different. While Lynx just plainly ignores html-table-tags and replaces them with linebreaks, this Opera thingy is actually doing reformatting of the page, after a full analysis of the layout.
Even though I don't know how well this works, it seems like a extremely clever algoritm, and shouldn't be underestimated as simple table-dropping, which is actually a lack of standard features.
From the opera-quote:
This implies more than mere table-dropping to me at least, and especially if you read the press release (no I will nothunt it down for you).
Re:Small screen rendering (Score:2)
Re:Small screen rendering (Score:3, Informative)
You are joking, right?
Rendering HTML in text mode is one thing. Add CSS, Javascript, DOM etc and it's an whole nother story.
I'm not saying that all these technologies are so great, but a large amount of sites rely on it today. Being able to render a document that contains all that stuff properly is unique by itself. There are only a handful of browsers that can get close.
What Opera does is difficult because not only are they trying to support all these technologies, but they also have to deal with these other trivialities that Lynx can conveniently ignore, called graphics/images.
Re:Small screen rendering (Score:2, Informative)
http://daniel.glazman.free.fr/weblog/archived/200
Re:Small screen rendering (Score:2)
Re:Small screen rendering (Score:2)
Nice.
However, if you want to read slashdot on your phone or PDA then I (very biasedly) recommend using Avantslash [fourteenminutes.com] which provides you with all the content [fourteenminutes.com] and non of the other rubbish.
Works pretty well through Googles HTML->WAP convertor too. If you've got a WAP browser installed, then click here [google.com] to see it.
Re:Small screen rendering (Score:2)
There could be a problem with absolute widths specified in CSS styles ('width: 500cm') but I don't think many web pages do that. And if you do find absolute widths or pixel widths, well just ignore them. It's not hard to do if you already have a working HTML display engine.
UI Customization (Score:5, Interesting)
My opinion is that Opera's supposed smart "massaging," also mentioned in the article, will be hailed as easier to use than Microsoft's Pocket IE, and thus play a larger end-user role than vendor customizing.
Although, it is nice to see vendors say that the Windows UI is bland, ubiquitous, and doesn't possess the uniqueness that Nokia et al. want.
Business deals and positive/negative corporate assocations usually trump user comments and design staff, IMO, but not always.
Standards, uh? (Score:4, Informative)
What standards? Do you mean the de-facto standard for desktop computers (MicroSoft), or the vendor-independent web standards, which Opera has traditionally supported like no other?
---
``The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from; furthermore, if you do not like any of them, you can just wait for next year's model.''
-- Andrew S. Tannenbaum
Bad Reasoning... (Score:5, Insightful)
Err right. That might be true in the
The reason that Opera could be gaining ground is that they made a good product. That's it. Even in the mobile market. I got a chance to use a Zaurus running Opera, and found it to be a rather pleasant experience. It definitely kicked IE on PocketPC's butt.
However, I'm not exactly picketing Opera to make a PocketPC version. Why? I don't browse the web on my PocketPC. It's a horrible experience. Not because IE is bad (although it is, at least for browsing the web) but because the PDA doesn't give you the resolution and speed you need. It works great with Avantgo, though. No complaints there. With AvantGo, the pages are formatted to PocketPC. As long as I have AvantGo (even works wirelessly), then I don't care if it's Opera or IE, or even Mozilla.
Opera doesn't have a whole lot of chance of gaining ground until PDAs become capable of viewing entire web pages. I don't think that tech is very far away. LCD technology has gotten a lot better in the DPI realm. It won't be more than a year or two before those tiny devices can run at 480 by 640. When that happens, Opera suddenly becomes an interesting alternative.
It's a pity, really. I think Opera deserves more attention on
Re:Bad Reasoning... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's a consumer argument. System sellers, i.e. the phone manufacturers, have seen what happened to IBM when they made the mistake of allowing MS to control the "user experience" and they don't want it to happen to them.
As it happens, Opera is a very good browser anyway. If it was open source it would get more support and would develop faster.
TWW
Re:Bad Reasoning... (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, if you'd read the article, you'd have seen that the advantage Opera has in not being a MS product is that the MS browser will only run on a phone that has an MS operating system - and not many cell phone manufacturers are interested in going for that option at this point.
Why exactly does Opera deserve more attention than Mozilla? Having only one ding against it doesn't make it better unless you're saying that Mozilla has more dings against it. And the way I see it, Mozilla has several advantages over Opera:
Re:Bad Reasoning... (Score:2)
Wait... Wait... DING! DING! DING! Must be that open source ding making itself known. But who would expect it on
Personally I have Opera loaded, and used it for a couple websites when Mozilla wasn't working with them, but these days Mozilla doesn't seem to have nearly as many problems and, to boot, it has been getting faster. The speed difference was apparent when I upgraded from my month old nightly build to 2002112008. The speed feel is about 1/2 between Phoenix (fast) and the month old Mozilla (sluggish). Sweet...
Re:Bad Reasoning... (Score:3, Informative)
About two years ago, my wife brought home the prototype of a PDA/cell phone thingy. (the day before Andy Grove had showed the exact device at a wireless conference; I still wonder how she got a hold of it
Anyways, this thing had a 640x480 display and the device itself wasn't really bigger than say an iPaq. The most amazing thing was that it _actually_ worked. The built in phone worked fine and browsing was actually quite acceptable. The only thing that didn't work was the bluetooth pen that was supposed to double as the earpiece.
Well, I was very impressed to see the device that I had always wanted and had dreamed of. So I played with it for at least 5 minutes, thought 'ok, it can be done', and went back to doing fun stuff.
Regarding the Symbian OS... (Score:2, Offtopic)
Apparently, others [google.com] has had the same thoughts as me and the comments from Psion is amusing.
Probably... (Score:4, Insightful)
My experience with Scandanavian companies is that they like to stick together. They would much rather deal with someone close by or at least in the European Region.
This gives Opera another leg up, as Nokia and Ericson are in the same region.
Jason
There's already a leader (Score:3, Informative)
Their solution is already selling millions a month.
The real question is will people use smart phones to browse the web.
Small Screen Rendering in Opera Beta 7 (Score:5, Interesting)
The latest beta (version 7) has the ability to render the screen as if viewed on a small screen (press shift-F11 to toggle the view)... This makes testing instantly easier.
I just love the opera browser (mouse gestures, tabbed browsing..etc) and have gladly payed for the privilage since opera 5, but thats just my choice..isn't that what this is about.
There is no way that IE has the market tied down at the moment because they don't control the platform that it sits on. This will be a much better test of browser preference than the artificial desktop browser choice, because MS don't control the platform (symbian platform that is)
familiar look and feel? (Score:3, Funny)
User: Dammit, my cellphone bluescreened again!
Slashdot user: I bet I could h4x0R the modem and form a cellphone beowulf cluster, but someone said ??? = PROFIT! and then all the cellphones belonged to Bill...
Opera's Small-Screen Rendering (Score:5, Interesting)
Then hit Shift-F11 to put it in small-screen mode.
From playing with this for a while, it seems to be really very clever about what information it keeps and what it throws away. Browsing Slashdot, for instance, is very useable.
Also, the cellphone version supposedly retains the ability to zoom in on areas of the page you want to see in more detail.
The Ericsson P800 and Nokia 3650 will both probably be able to run Opera. Opera's site says they have a version for Symbian OS, but that the only current Symbian handset, the Nokia 7650, doesn't quite have enough memory to run it.
-Ciaran
Re:Opera's Small-Screen Rendering (Score:2)
If I have read correctly, the actual "smart selection", image resizing etc. will normally happen on a proxy your cell-phone browser talks to, so that data transfer over the (still expensive) wireless wire is minimized.
This reminds me, (Score:3, Insightful)
In essence, that's where Opera stands as they have a lot of potential to be a dominating web-browsing force on the cellphone platform -- If they play their cards right.
A line from the article struck me odd.
"Microsoft's browser will work only on phones powered by Microsoft's cellphone operating system"
This shouldn't be surprising but just *read* that sentance. A cellphone operating system? At least to the laymen like myself, it seems kind of outlandish. But it also gives a clue to what microsoft is aiming for. It's not enough that they want to to be #1 and the only provider of a celphone broswer. That's understandable, just like Opera's motives. But to SHOVE a whole MS operating system in there in the process only reeks of shit that you've all heard before.
A phone, like a pair of shoes or a car, and unlike a PC or a coffeemaker, is a personal device, a fashion accessory that says something about its owner.
Yeah, it says "Hey! look at me with my default and super annoying ringtone that everyone hates so much. I'd love to talk but I gotta kick some ass in this fighting game that's causing my vision to blur, which makes it hard when i'm driving while talking on my cellphone..Ow, and this tumor on my head is really itchy, God and the buttons are so...*CLICK*
(I happen to be an owner of a cellphone
Phone vendors are sniffing at the PDA market (Score:4, Interesting)
Basically the dilema is that a PDA should be PDA sized, and a phone should be phone shaped, and these are different shapes. The Treo tries to find a middle ground, and doesn't do too badly, but I still prefer the two-device model, where my phone and Palm are seperate but can talk to each other easily (thru bluetooth, etc.)
Operas SSB is nice, I will miss them...... (Score:3)
What this new Opera small screen technology really does is to make it easyer to create webcontent aimed at GSM phone users and palmtop users, lets not forget them. To be able to create HTML based webcontent kicks the ass off of iMode and WAP because it is much easyer to, say create a Smallscreen version of your website in a proper web design package like for example Dreamweaver or perhaps by using XML and Style sheets than it is to create a WAP version from existing HTML material. I would be alot happyer creating two different versions of my site using some Library function in Dreamweaver for storing the content and displaying it in different HTML templates enabling me to make changes to both versions at the same time than I would be to create a WAP version since it would be harder to keep it current.
That being said I will miss Opera when Microsoft stomps them into the ground and dances a Seattle folk dance on Operas mangled corpse.
Re:Operas SSB is nice, I will miss them...... (Score:2)
Does "self-fulfilling prophecy" mean anything to you?
Re:Operas SSB is nice, I will miss them...... (Score:2)
A self fulfilling propecy is an asumption or prediction that, purely as a result of being made, causes the expected or predicted event to occur and thus confirming its own accuracy.
I fail to see how my little prediction would actually cause Opera to be ripped apart and eaten alive by Microsoft. I can only wish I had that much clout! If I did Linux would rule and Ariel Sharon would have an Iron fist twisting his balls on settling the Middle East issue of a fully sovreign Palestinan state. On the other hand I will freely admit to indirectly predicting the patently obvious.
Regards
Savage-Rabbit
Re:Operas SSB is nice, I will miss them...... (Score:2)
Luckily, Nokia and Ericsson seems smart enough to avoid this way of thinking.Savage-Rabbit seems susceptible to it, though.
Microsoft is actualy quite small (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Microsoft is actualy quite small (Score:2, Informative)
fastest ever (Score:2, Insightful)
Microsoft's APIs don't do for Sendo (Score:5, Funny)
On Sendo's leaving Microsoft and using Symbian, where they get the source and are allowed to tweak with it:
Was it a technology problem -- did Microsoft's software work? "It was a not a technology issue," she said. "I cannot go into all the details about it, but our business model is to offer very customized phones so they have something to distinguish themselves in the marketplace, which we cannot offer if we don't have the source code."
Microsoft dismissed this explanation. In an e-mail, Suwanjindar said that Microsoft's "shared source" model "provides partners with the APIs [application programming interfaces] they need in order to customize and develop applications for our platform."
Sendo: We don't like your deal, it isn't flexible enough.
Microsoft: We'll give you our API's.
Sendo: API's aren't as flexible as the full source code.
Microsoft (handwaving): API's will do.
Sendo: No, they won't.
Microsoft (handwaving again): APIs will do.
Sendo: No, they won't! You think you're some kind of jedi, waving your hand like that?
Java for Mobile Devices (Score:3, Informative)
Mozilla is not perfect (Score:5, Insightful)
I am not using Opera, because I have strong computer and I can waste resources for such product like Mozilla. But there are places when Mozilla is not a right thing.
Microsoft has more has 300+ browser patents (Score:4, Informative)
So what they don't get by technology, they might try to force by litigation, particularly if software patents would be officialised in Europe.
misuse of the word 'standards' (Score:2, Informative)
Therefore, implicitly equating "standards" with MS's "familiarity" while talking about browsers is dumb. If MS doesn't take over by convincing the phone companies that their phones need to be maximally familiar to windows users, then there is some hope that standards compliant browsers such as Opera will prosper in this sector.
So, MS will just buy the opera browser... (Score:2)
Re:So, MS will just buy the opera browser... (Score:2)
they don't get it (Score:2, Informative)
Re:they don't get it (Score:2)
I use opera on a handheld but... (Score:3, Interesting)
For those reasons, I'd say that Konqueror is a much better choice. Both of them run on the Zaurus (K runs on OpenZaurus, which BTW kicks azz)
IE on a handheld? No way, I don't want to permanently have a 512M CF in it just to run IE!
Microsoft's problem will be their own brand (Score:3, Interesting)
No, not recognition of the brand and fear of them, the brand itself. MS values it's Windows brand highly. A product is no good for them unless it prominently carries the Windows brand on it. That's why they're so adamant about retaining their logos and appearance on the desktop. The problem is, to a phone manufacturer thier brand is incredibly important, much more so than the hardware and firmware in the phone. If you pick up a Nokia phone and it doesn't have their brand clearly visible, if instead the most clearly visible label is some other company's, this is not in Nokia's best interest. I don't see any way MS can shell out enough money to convince the cel-phone makers to give up their brands, so I don't think MS is going to make much headway with them. That's undoubtably why Sendo switched away from them: technical flexibility aside, the MS licensing terms probably prohibited Sendo from removing all traces of the Windows brand and making it appear to be a completely Sendo phone.
Re:As for Opera's "small screen rendering" (Score:2, Interesting)