Opera Mini: A web browser for virtually all mobile phones
Published August 10th, 2005 9:12 AM EDT By Daniel GoldmanOpera introduced today Opera Mini, a new kind of web browser for virtually all mobile phones.
Opera Mini is designed to enable the web on mobile phones that would normally be incapable of running a Web browser.
Instead of requiring the phone to process Web pages, Opera Mini uses a remote server to pre-process the page before sending it to the phone (see illustration below), which makes it perfect for phones with very low resources, or low bandwidth connections.
Pages are reformatted and compressed before being sent to the phone, so they only use about one fifth of their normal amount of traffic.
Opera Mini will store the cache, history, cookies, and passwords for pages you visit on the your service provider’s server, which may raise some privacy concerns.
For the moment Opera Mini is only available in Norway, with wider availability to be announced in the future.
The new Opera Mini will be free to download and use and does not require any registration fee. Though your service provider may charge you for the network traffic.
Opera Mini runs on all phones that support Java, which most already do. It is estimated that there are more than 700 million Java enabled mobile phones in the market.
cool!
Perfect!
As I understand it almost as Opera Mobile browser with Opera Mobile Accelerator, but free and runs if your phone has Java?…
– FataL
INCREDIBLE!
Could some norwegian dude post the .class somewhere so we mere mortals can have a look? A Java Opera could be very interesting, not just for phones, though I suppose most of the cool stuff goes down on those servers.
Bas,
Having the Java class files that run on the mobile phone won’t give you much information.
It’s built using a client-server model. The client only makes the request to the server, so all the heavy-lifting is done on the server side, which may not even be written in Java.
You can download the client side Java class file yourself, and decompile it. You probably won’t see much there.
Do you have an URL?
Bas,
No I don’t have a URL to the download file.
Opera Mini is not download though Opera.com, but rather from the mobile phone’s service provider. This is done by sending an SMS message with the message “Opera” to 1984. This will only work in Norway.
But again, I don’t think you’ll see much in those files.
If you do find something interesting, share it with the rest of us.
I found the URL you get from the SMS, it points to a high memory version. Unfortunatly that gives some Norwegian error (I can only assume it doesn’t like my 3GHz mobile phone running Opera for Windows). I can’t get around this with some simple user agent spoofing (see this somewhat outdated list), I think there’s some sort of server-side phone specific caller-id checking going on, which would be tuff to crack without a phone in Norway.
I’m going to wait a few days to see if a copy surfaces on the web somewhere.
I used this link in my Motorola V551 wap browser and the page loaded with download link. It even detected my phone version and java status. I’m in the United States using Cingular. However, when I clicked on the download link and the alternate download link it said “”The Requested Page can not be displayed”.
mini.opera.com/tv2/
I can’t wait for this to be available in the US. I’m planning on upgrading my phone soon, but most of the web-capable phones don’t seem to do much more than convert HTML to WML. For a real browser you have to move up to the Blackberry/PDA level.
I tried to cross-reference Opera’s list of phones with T-Mobile’s, and I came up with no overlap. But just about anything can run Java…
To get Opera Mini running on windows:
Get yourself a copy of J2ME Wireless Toolkit 2.2, it includes an emulator to run midlets.
Create a opera.jad file with this in it:
MIDlet-1: Opera Mini, /icon1616.png, com.opera.browser.Browser
MIDlet-Name: Opera Mini
MicroEdition-Configuration: CLDC-1.0
MIDlet-Vendor: Opera Software ASA
MicroEdition-Profile: MIDP-2.0
MIDlet-Version: 1.0
MIDlet-Jar-Size: 101169
MIDlet-Info-URL: http://www.opera.com
MIDlet-Description: Opera Mini
MIDlet-Permissions: javax.microedition.io.Connector.http
Content-Folder: Applications
Operette-Anr: 4799277961
Operette-Brand: Brand
Operette-Model: Model
Operette-UA: UA
MIDlet-Jar-URL: http://wapb.tv2.no/opera/getOperette/fetch?TXID=1123685850069
Double click the jad file you just made.
Just enter “Meny” (Menu) -> “Verktøy” (Tools) -> “Instillinger” (Settings) -> “Språk” (Language) -> “English” -> “OK” -> “Lagre” (Save)
Tada, a fully working Opera Mini. Follow MIDlet-Jar-URL for the jar and have fun with the sources.
This is taking way to much of my time. I was interested in this for my PocketPC, but getting java to run on that is a pain anyway, mobile or standard. Besides, a native version was announced for PocketPC, and I don’t even have bluetooth or wifi on my PDA, so I’d have to hack together a method to open from local storage.
Does anyone have a .jar or .jad URL of the low memory version?
Is it possible to use Opera Mini with GSM instead of GPRS connections?
yes, it works with GSM too
works awesome, ebay, hotmail…great!!
I am using Opera browser for my mobile phone. It’s very good idea and usefull gadget.