Yeah, I think you are right in that Apple has the budget and marketing know how to push an established concept and push it main stream. We are certainly seeing added interest from carriers and phone providers post iPhone announcement, as they want to be able to compete, and Opera is one of the few companies that produce a high quality full web browser on phones.

I wish I could talk more about Opera Mini 4, but I’ll have to wait until the 19th. I think it is going impress a lot of people, especially considering the low end hardware it can run on. I’d recommend anyone to download the beta and give us feedback.

I’ll most likely be at Web Directions South, so I’ll probably see you and Maxine there. I’ll hopefully meet Russ and the rest of the Australian crew too.

thanks for the detailed comment. I’ll start by saying that it was viwing my site in Opera on a Sony Ericssen phone in 2003 (and it worked) which really kickstarted my excitement about the mobile web. I’d long been banging on bout using CSS etc etc cause your sites will work when the mobile web takes off, but this was living proof.

Perhaps my analogy would have been better put that the iPhone is the netscape of the mobile web. I was actually a long Mosaic holdout in fact, but while Netscape did little if anything novel in comparison with Mosaic, at least initially, it was somehow associated with the web tipping across into mainstream use.

I do believe that the iPhone (perhaps precisely because of Jobs legendary RDF) will mark a watershed in the tipping point of the mobile web. But I don’t thnk it will be bad for all the other handset and embedded browser folks, because unlike mp3 players, there are so many other dynamics — telcos, demographics, diferent kinds of use and so on. If it only makes mobile carriers stop their insistence on crippling devices, as they do in the US, it will be a very important moment for the whole industry.

So, please don’t take my comments as a criticism of Opera’s technology, and thanks for outlining all that Opera has done and is doing — as a software developer, I know what it is like or others to get the glory for stuff you’ve been doing for ages ;-) We love the little guys.

And maybe we’ll see you down here in September?

j

We already have two mobile browsers that can access the real full web, that use the full Opera rendering engine and include things like CSS3 Media Queries and handheld stylesheets to allow designers to customise for mobile (Safari doesn’t support handheld stylesheets).

Opera Mobile supports webapps or mobile widgets. We had this before Safari

We are also already cross platform, but include more platforms including Linux and BSD, and many many more phones, from feature phones like the razr to Windows Mobile, S60 and UIQ. We have deals with major carriers like T-mobile, Telefonica, KDDI and phone manufacturers like Nokia, Sony Eriksson, Motorola, Palm, Samsung etc, so both Opera Mobile and Opera Mini are widely distributed and will be distributed even more in the future. One can also test for Opera using the desktop browser as it has a mobile mode that respects handheld stylesheets or uses small screen rendering. To test the desktop mode you can just use the regular desktop mode too.

Opera Mini compresses pages on the server, so the running cost will be lower than Safari on iPhone. There are also already WiFi enabled phones out there that Opera will run on. The P990 is an example.

Opera Mobile already has a desktop view just like Safari uses and the S60 browser. We also use a similar technique on the Nintendo Wii.

Now, don’t get me wrong, Safari is a great browser, Safari on iPhone is probably also great, but it isn’t anything that hasn’t been done before, no matter how strong Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field is. They’ve just got more mind share and a bigger marketing budget. Lets have some love for the little guys ;)