I’ve always been fascinated by technology and computers of all kinds in particular. I simply love shiny things that beep, whirr and buzz. A particular favourite is mobile technology such as PDA’s and cellular phones. I’ve owned loads of these over the years, everything from simple Nokia’s to advanced smartphones. Currently I’m sporting a HTC TyTn II which is a Windows Mobile-based smartphone with a full qwerty keyboard and a touchscreen. It’s no longer the latest and greatest (about a year old), but it’s still among the most advanced devices out there. A favourite use for it, besides of the calendar and SMS, is using it to browse the web. Either with wifi or EDGE/3G as data connection.

At first thought, browsing seems ridiculous on a small-screen device, but it’s surprisingly effective once you get used to it. Yes, things are smaller, but the information’s still there and there are many ways to present content in such a way that its very usable on a mobile device. There are many browsers for mobile devices, and most of them aren’t really all that. I’ve tested a load of them, but I always come back to one in particular. Opera’s “Mini”. This is a java-based browser that can and will work on almost any device supporting java (mostly all devices made after 2003-2004 do) and it works well! Opera Mini uses a technique where pages are pre-rendered on a server run by Opera, thus the content you get on your screen is optimized to reduce load and data costs. Opera Mini both support WAP and pure old-fashioned full web-pages. Upon entering a “full” page you get an overview of the entire site and a simple click on the screen (if you got a touchscreen device) zoom you where you want to go. Alternatively you can just use arrow and enter-keys to scroll, zoom in/out and browse. This works just as well and is what I use mostly, even with a touchscreen device, but this is just personal preference. I mostly access WAP-pages like the major news-sites in Norway, techie news and checking when the bus or subway is scheduled, but it’s also extremely handy to be able to access all kinds of web-pages, including log-in-sites like gmail, register or even do forum browsing and posting. Oh, I almost forgot to mention Opera Mini is free too! :)

Here’s Opera Mini in action.

The easiest way to get Opera Mini is to go to mini.opera.com with your mobile phone’s built-in browser and download it directly to your phone. You can also access this site with your computers web-browser and download the applet and manually transfer it to you phone/PDA.

Opera also have a more advanced kind of mobile device browser, namely Opera Mobile. This one isn’t free but also comes with features such as tabbed browsing. Interestingly enough, it does not use the server pre-render-technology of Opera Mini, so it tends to actually be somewat slower than its kid brother, although, it blasts away the competition from other mobile browsers. Another important difference from Opera Mini is that it’s not available for “normal” phones, primarly only for the major smartphone OS’es.

Here’s Opera’s introduction/comercial video of Opera Mobile. It’s a bit long, but it’s an awesome product too :)

You can get Opera Mobile in beta from here. It’s bundled with many new smartphones, like the HTC DIamond and Touch Pro.

As a side-note or if you want to test WAP, you can enter this site in any wap-browser (www.mindovermadness.org) and you will be presented with a mobile-optimized version of my blog. The server will/should detect if you’re on a mobile device and this is all automated.