Wii’s zoom capabilities are coming to the Opera Mobile web browser
Published February 12th, 2007 11:50 AM EST By Daniel GoldmanThe upcoming edition of Opera Mobile will be based on the Opera 9 browser and will include features such as Opera Widgets and Intelligent Zoom.
Navigation on the webpage will be change quite a bit. You’ll be able to easily change viewing modes to get a birds-eye perspective of the page or zoom directly into the content you want to see. This is the same zoom technology that was first added to the Opera browser on the Nintendo Wii (Watch the official Wii demo).
Previously on Opera Mobile, you still had Opera’s zoom capabilities (same as in the desktop browser), but you needed to zoom the entire page and then scroll to your desired area. With the zoom in the Wii and now with Opera Mobile, you see an overview of the webpage, just like you would on a PC, and zoom directly into a selected area.
Also making their debut with Opera Mobile are Opera Widgets. Opera Widgets are small web applications that run outside of the browser and are instantly accessible on the phone without having to launch the Web browser.
Opera Widgets are based on the same technologies used to create webpages – HTML, CSS, JavaScript (and AJAX) – so you could easily create a weather, traffic, news or email widget that gets its data by using AJAX, for example. No longer do you need to program your mobile applications in J2ME, etc – now, it’s as simple as developing webpage.
Opera Mobile is currently shipped on more than 50 million phones from major manufacturers such as Motorola, Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson.
(Tip: In the Opera desktop browser you could zoom in and out by using the “+” and “-” keys on your keyboard. Press the number “6” to get back to the regular zoom. You could also zoom a webpage with your mouse wheel while holding the “CTRL” key.)
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Yay \o/
I just hope that Opera Mobile 9 will still work on Symbian 7 based devices.
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Mmmmh maybe in a cellphone it works better, but with the poor quality of the TV monitor a “Fit to width” would be better.
) solution. Or a combined “intelligent zoom” (single click) and “fit to width” (double click”). Imho.
In Wii, the intelligent zoom simply enlarge the text until the available width, but often it’s not enough and so i’ve to change to Small Screen Rendering. Or it enlarge the text too much and i’ve to scroll right & left for every single line.
And i change to Small Screen rendering again
I believe “Fit to width” is the best (and older
Cheers. G
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Opera Mobile for Blackberry and Palm Treo!
Please! Mini is great on these devices, but I’d love to have full use with Mobile.
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This sound too much like a press release to me, aren’t Operawatch readers supposed to know this already?
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minisu, most people, I believe, don’t know what Opera Widgets are. Most desktop users, in fact, that I’ve spoken to about Opera Widgets find it useless — they don’t understand the real benefit to it. The first paragraph that you mentioned aims to explain a bit why Opera added widgets to the browser, and that’s to make it easier to develop web applications on places like devices and mobile phones. It’s not understood to everyone.
The last paragraph is a new piece of information. Until now the public count was 40 million phones — now it’s 50.
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I hoped for some at least unspecific information about the release time.
Also Opera’s press release sounds a bit strange - “Opera Software today announced plans to upgrade mobile Web browsing by developing Opera 9 for mobile phones in all major platforms.”
I have the impression that this decision had been made some months ago (well, maybe not for every platform). Opera for Wii is available as beta and already based on the core of Opera9. Furthermore I expect the next - Opera9 based - release for Opera Mobile for Pocket PC in Q1/2007. Maybe Opera’s plans have changed meanwhile but there still is hope as Q1 isn’t over yet.
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ResearchWizard, Opera has 3 main units. a) Desktop b) Mobile c) Devices. This announcement only relates to the mobile, not devices (which the Wii is part of).
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Daniel, thank you for this hint - seems I didn’t think differentiated enough about that.
Nevertheless I still have hope for some at least unspecific information about the release time of Opera Mobile 9.
Since there was something like a hint in some forum entry I expect the next release for Opera Mobile for Pocket PC in Q1/2007.
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Press release
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I just hope the next version of Opera Mobile supports Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphone, since they skipped it entirely in 8.5…
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Hi there!
It was my birthday present.
Just got a Wii!
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FataL, nice — I see you posted with the Wii.