The Mobile Web Tablet

Got myself a true mobile web tablet yesterday: a Nokia N800. Let’s see if it will replace my Sony Ericsson/UIQ + Opera Mini-combo for doing all that micro-surfing to kill off dull moments throughout the day. Time will tell.

First impression: a much better device than the Nokia 770, which was a typical 1.0 showing great promises but failing to live up to them. Can’t say that the N800 is a high performer but it’s certainly faster than the 770.

Also got myself an Apple Bluetooth Keyboard to use with the N800, my Macbook and whatever needs a keyboard and supports Bluetooth HID. Will try it out today at the Hubbub conference.

(I’m also considering buying the QNAP TS-209. This is a small linux machine whos primary purpose is storage, but it also has a MySQL-server, a web server and a few other goodies running on it. Together with my Macbook, that’s two linux devices that will make my life a Microsoft-free zone.

Linux might never conquer the desktop, but it might very well take over everything else.)

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Spent the afternoon at the Daytona Session here in Stockholm. A mini-conference focusing on the future of the internet. One of the speakers was Stefan Waldeck from Yahoo! Sweden. He talked about mobile (which by the way was a common theme amongst the speakers – seems that’s where the future of the web is) and mentioned that the Yahoo! Go Mobile client will soon be preinstalled in available for (?) more than 200 devices from all the five major device manufacturers.

Sounds like news to me. At least I’ve missed it.

I wonder what the deal is between Yahoo! and the manufacturers. A not too wild guess would be revenue sharing of ads shown in the application. Consequence: your next phone might be subsidized not only by the operator but also by Yahoo!. In other words, mobile advertising is coming and it will take the shape of value added applications in your phone.

Another example of this: Yahoo! is also the search engine that pays for you to use Opera Mini (you didn’t think it was really free, did you?). Together with Yahoo! Go Mobile in 200 devices, Yahoo! can take a significant chunk out of that mobile revenue that Google wants with their as-of-yet-non-existing GPhone.

Microsoft has been trying to break in to the telecom market for years with Windows Mobile but they will most likely join the advertising war. They’re just a little late for the game.

Microsoft, Google Phone, Yahoo! Go Mobile… looks like the future of the web really is in mobile.

Pictures from the event here.

Updated: Lotta Holmstr??m at Citizen Watch also wrote about the Yahoo! presentation:

Yahoo! Go is a small java applet which lets the user access email, flickr, search and more. It will be in 200 cellphone models at the end of the year.

What does “in” mean? Preinstalled or available for?

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It’s a classic underdog story. When a couple of engineers at web browser maker Opera suggested to management that they should try building a mobile java version of their browser, no one listened. Well, they built it and it’s about to outgrow its desktop bigger brother. Here are some stats for browser market share:

(source)

Another way of putting the stats:

• Opera Mini: massive growth.
• Opera: no growth.

In a couple of months time, Opera Mini might very well pass its bigger brother and place itself amongst the top 4 browsers on the net (including desktop browsers).

Amazing! Really.

Compare this to other mobile (and pre-installed) browsers such as Access Netfront with a 0.01% market share according to the same statistics and it becomes even more amazing.

Now, “0.39%” of web traffic might not sound too impressive to you, but if you ever have tried building an application for mass market mobile phones you know that it’s a huge effort even getting it to work on the devices out there.

Then you have to convince people to download and install it. If you’re lucky, the settings for internet access are correct in their phones. If you’re even more lucky, they manage to find the application in the menu system after it’s been downloaded and installed.

And, remember, the users already have a browser pre-installed on their phones. It’s a native application and supposed to be faster and better integrated to the device. Your browser can’t be equally good to the native browser, it has to be much better otherwise people don’t bother downloading it.

Then there’s the whole mobile browsing business, which hasn’t really taken off the way once predicted. First and foremost you have to convince people of the very idea that a web browser in your phone actually can be usable.

Well, Opera pulled it off.

Looking at the statistics, it seems like Opera Mini right now is the engine pulling the entire mobile web up to the domains of the desktop world.

Look at the September stats:

Microsoft Internet Explorer 77.86%
Firefox 14.88%
Safari 5.07%
Opera 0.87%
Netscape 0.72%
Opera Mini 0.39%

There’s not a mobile browser in sight, except for Mini (disclaimer: I don’t know the percentage of iPhone users in the Safari stats). The competitors are down at 0.01%-0.02%. If Minis growth continues, it will hit 1% within 6-9 months and become the number 4 browser.

There’s only one conclusion to draw: right now the mobile web is Opera Mini and Opera Mini is the mobile web.

Sorry, Russell, but that’s a fact.

Opera Mini is becoming so big it soon makes sense to develop web sites and applications targeted towards Mini as a platform. In fact, if you plan to take your web site mobile (and of course you plan to do that, you’d be crazy not to), Opera Mini is the platform to use to do that. As a bonus, it will work on the iPhone too.

Now, if only Opera could follow Apple and open up the browser for access to the phone hardware and underlying OS (via the J2ME APIs), that would make one heck of a platform for mobile development. (I’ve actually suggested this to Opera a couple of times, but the message doesn’t seem to have sunk in. Oh well, the last time was pre-iPhone so maybe they’re starting to get it now. JSR290 is the Java standardization attempt of basically the same thing. )

Interesting times to work with the mobile web. Maybe 2008 will be the year it really takes off. If it does, it will be much thanks to Opera Mini. Who said mobile java is just good for games?

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Been trying out the new Opera Mini beta on my Sony Ericsson M600 today. This is version 4 of the extremely popular java-based (downloadable) web browser for mobile phones.

My first impression was: oh, no, they made the GUI too slow and cumbersome. The clean simplicity of the first versions seemed to be gone. But as I’ve started to use it I got more comfortable with it and I’m beginning to really like it.

The biggest change is that pages are now showed full size (sort of). You navigate around the screen by moving a rectangle over the page. By clicking the square you zoom in to the page and can read it on a tiny mobile phone screen. On an M600 with a pointing device (and fairly large screen) this works really well. Haven’t tried it on a phone without touch screen yet.

Page rendering is also much better than previous versions. Bloglines (the RSS-reader) and Google Mail both worked and Google Calendar seems to have a mobile friendly style sheet which formated the calendar to fit perfectly in to my device.

Bloglines is noteworthy because it uses frames. It has two frames, with the RSS feeds on the left and the posted items on the right. Opera Mini renders the left frame by itself and when I click a link it changes to the right frame. Smooth!

Seems to be a bug in the bookmark manager (the data for the page I was on when clicking “add bookmark” is not filled in to the bookmark manager) but other than that it seems stable.

The Sony Ericsson M600 together with Opera Mini, Google Maps Mobile and Gmail App is a very capable little web tablet. The same applications run on most modern mobile phones – and they’re free. A mobile web tablet experience is only a few joystick clicks away. Download them all! I promise, you won’t look at your phone the same way again.

Updated: major issue: cookies doesn’t work. Oh well, it’s beta…

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I’m just returning home from the Reboot-conference, two days of inspiring talks and people. One of the talks was by the CEO of Opera, H?•kon Lie. It was entitled The web everywhere: $10 paperbacks, $50 phones, $100 laptops and $250 game consoles and H?•kon brought a $100 computer to the stage (you know, the one designed for kids in third world countries).

Interest in the Fisher-Price inspired device was huge. People were packed around the little green toy, trying to catch a glimpse of it or feel it. Here’s a picture of what it looked like.

Even though the One Laptop Per Child-PC has a larger goal than just being yet another gadget for the 2.0-crowd, you could still feel the “I want one”-urge around the little plastic device. There seems to be something very appealing in the idea of a cheap, portable internet-connected device with a large screen and real keyboard.

The Foleo is quite small.

How strange then, that the new Palm device, the Foleo is met by the blogosphere with disappointment and doubt. Reactions seem to be mostly of the “what-the-heck-is-this”-variety. I really wonder why.

It has an open Linux OS, a web browser, a full keyboard, wifi, usb and bluetooth. It’s relatively light weight and with instant power on. I’d say, this is a very interesting device that may very well replace my laptop at least when traveling. Especially if I can plug in an external hard drive and a digital camera.

The most common reaction to the device seems to be “I can get a real laptop for $700, why should I buy this for $500?”. That’s a valid question and the Foleo will be an interesting test of the market to see if it’s possible to penetrate the Windows (and Mac OS/X) domination. The laptops in this price range often has a 14 or 15 inch display so it’s not really the same product.

Or is it?

I really don’t know. That’s why it’s and interesting development to follow, as this could be a whole new market: the 5 to 10 inch displays and sub $1000 price. There are UMPCs (Windows), Nokia web tablets (Maemo Linux) and Sony UX Micro PC (Windows, too expensive, though).

So, this is a battle ground and the winner will dig deeper, into the huge 2 to 5 inch display market that today is occupied by mobile phones. A lot of players will try and stop Microsoft from going there.

Could be that the price is what keeps Foleo from becoming a success. It might have to distance itself from a Microsoft laptop even further and $500 might not be enough. I wouldn’t be surprised if the $100 laptop has some successors targeted at the same audience and UMPCs will continue to drop in price.

The Foleo might end up squashed in an impossible price point. Never the less, the cheap, portable, mobile web tablet is coming and the Foleo is a step in the right direction. I’m looking forward to the response from Apple, Nokia, Google, Microsoft, Sony and all the other players on the field.

I just wonder how many of them will have a hand crank.

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Johan Sch??ns post at the Opera Mini blog raised my curiosity:

The Opera Mini team has been hard at work for quite some time now on the next major version of Mini. We’re proud and excited that people who have had a chance to test early versions call this new generation another breakthrough in mobile web browsing.

Opera Mini, with an amazing 15 million downloads (!), is in my opinion (and, apparently, 15 million other peoples) the best way to surf the net outside a PC.
In fact, after using the Nokia 770 web tablet for a while, I returned to my Sony Ericsson K800 running Opera Mini (and Google Mail and Google Maps Mobile in parallel). It’s just a perfect combination of portability, speed and ease of use.
So, what’s in store for the next version? To be honest, the upgrade to 2.0 wasn’t that exciting. It’s not an easy task: how do they improve what in essence is a good enough application? I’m really looking forward to find out with the 3.0 version.

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