Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology

Anders Borg writing about the fun and crazy world of mobile and Internet service technologies.

You can also read the blog via Twitter or your phone via wap.abiro.com. See the left menu for more news.

Comments on blog entries are moderated, but I'm rather liberal as long as it's not blatant advertising.

For general comments, advertising and contribution queries, please use the feedback form.

News feed (local)        FeedBurner Feed

Wednesday, April 05, 2006

 
Opera Mini gets competition from Bitstream
Bitstream has previously provided ThnderHawk as a browser for Windows CE that relies on a service that converts and compresses the data. Now Bitstream introduces its own Java-based browser which competes head to head with Opera Mini.

Quote: ThunderHawk Java/J2ME Edition displays full HTML Web pages just as they would appear on the desktop for a superior user experience.
This is different from Opera Mini that shows all content as one vertical banner.

Quote: If a browser reformats, repurposes or in some cases, even removes content ... subscribers will spend less time browsing
This sounds like a direct argument against Opera Mini (no names mentioned of course).

Bitstream Previews ThunderHawk(TM) Java/J2ME Mobile Browser at CTIA Wireless 2006

Comments:
How can you display a full webpage on a tiny mobile phone screen?

Bah, marketing droids and their outrageous claims...
 

They only mean you can see the whole page in its normal 2D form by scrolling around the page. You won't see the whole page at one time like you can on a Windows CE PDA.
 

So basically they are bragging about being years behind other browsers like Opera, Netfront and Minimo - browsers that actually adapt pages to fit onto smaller screens?

People don't want to scroll around horizontally. That's what browsers used to do, until they figured out that reformatting was the way to go.

Oh well, it's marketing after all :)
 

I've only seen the Windows CE version in action, and it did a good job at scaling down both text and pictures. Obviously a phone has even less "real estate" than a PDA.

Maybe you can find how they actually do it here:
http://bitstream.com/corporate/news/press_2006/th_060405_javaprev.html
I didn't though. They are talking about "eliminating excessive scrolling", so maybe it's some kind of "vertical" rendering after all. The quoted note indicated otherwise.

In any case, web browsers (and email, IM etc) made in J2ME is a hot topic right now, and it's in my opinion taken too long for operators to realize people want to browse the normal web, not just special mobile sites.
 

Post a Comment

Links to this post:

Create a Link



<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?