Opera Signs Nokia Phone Deal

Masq666 writes "Opera Software stated on Friday that it had signed a deal with Nokia to put its mobile Internet browser on several Nokia phones. Opera has licensed its mobile Internet browser for a total of 11 Nokia phone models in recent years. Opera's CFO said he expected the rise in the number of phones with Opera's browser to outpace the increase in models."

Comments

Symbian OS

[Broiler]

How long until Opera is the defacto browser for all Symbian OS phones?

Minimo?

[molrak]

What does this mean for Minimo (Mozilla's mini-browser that was funded/supported by Nokia)? It's been less than a year since they announced their financial support for the project,. I know the mozilla foundation released a few early versions for Windows CE/Pocket, but I haven't heard anything about the mobile phone version.

Re:Minimo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Given that Minimo is the early stages, it's possible that Nokia is still funding Minimo while using Opera. According to the article, the lowest price Opera charges per device is about 50 cents but you have to be shipping millions of the things to get that. If Minimo develops to a sufficient state, then Nokia gets a free browser. Forever.

Re:Yep

[UWC]

The mobile version of Opera has a 14-day trial period (ad-free) and then won't work without registration (or probably some other workaround; I have yet to investigate).

I installed it on my Nokia 3660 a while back and let the trial run out before I got around to trying to use it.

Is the nature of this announcement merely that Opera will officially offer versions that support an increasing number of Nokia phone models? Should I assume users will still have to pay for Opera?

Re:please no adds

[ianezz]

As long as it's without the adds, I think it's great to see what i still consider the best browser to be present on cell phones. Albeit that probably means the cell phones are running CE...

Well, high-end Nokia phones run Symbian OS (obviously: Nokia is a notable member of the Symbian consortium...), which basically is the good 'ol Epoc 32 which ran on Arm PDAs like the Psion Series 5. And Opera has been running for years on such machines, so that should be a no-brainer.

OTOH, Nokia uses its own GUI on top of Symbian, so this will probably mean some minor adjustments for Opera.

Re:Can anyone comment on the usability...

[it0]

It works out great, I use version 7.31 on my zaurus.
I don't understand how it works, but somebody told me that it is a css hack. Anyway for example you have 4 modes, with or without pics and fit to screen (columnn mode) and normal rendering. Let's say you have this complex page with css2 and javascript, some magic happens and it's completely readable on 320x240 in column mode.

Re:Yep

[SCHecklerX]

Actually, Nokia has some pretty kickass proxying solutions that rewrite all web content to fit perfectly on a mobile screen. Good stuff.

Re:please no adds

[bahwi]

I've got the Nokia Communicator 9500 and it's Opera with a different skin(Nokia's branded it for themselves, but the same stuff is there).

No ads, works great too. 9500 Rocks because it's Wifi enabled too. Kinda big, but that's why it has the nickname "The Brick."

Shards of malformed html

[Nexboy]

It might be interesting to run these browser-equipped PDA's and phones against the random shards of malformed html generated by Michael Zalewski's program mentioned previously on Slashdot.

I did a quick check of an embedded browser I had laying around, and it died instantly.