Opera entertains Android
11 April 2008
Opera entertains Android
Web browser developer Opera Software has made its popular Opera Mini browser available for the Android mobile platform.
A technical preview release is already available on the company's developer site, inviting the Android development community to test the fresh build.
"Today we're glad to deliver our mass-market mobile browser to the Android development groups," says Jon von Tetzchner, CEO of Opera. "Opera Mini will be able to empower users of Android-based handsets with access to all of their favourite web sites with popular features for smooth effects and scalable, tailored viewing."
The Google-backed Open Handset Alliance (OHA) is just one of the forums seeking to consolidate mobile Linux through Andoid, and telecoms.com got a sneak peak at the Android platform running on demonstration hardware at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. David Rose, director of OEM sales at chip maker ARM demonstrated the platform running on the already aging ARM9 processor. The interface was clean and surprisingly smooth flowing given the polished appearance of the UI, showing what could be achieved on lower end or older devices.
However, there wasn't much to see beyond what Google has already demonstrated in its own promo videos of the platform, so the demonstration was hardly conclusive.
The almost hardware agnostic deployment capability of Android is critical to the OHA's claims that Android is a platform that can be rolled out across any device range and developers are increasingly throwing their weight behind the platform.
Opera Mini boasts more than 40 million users worldwide across mobile platforms and enables web browsing from low-to-high resource handsets by compressing data at a remote server before sending content to the phone applet for rendering.
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