Mobile Development Made Simple(r) With Opera Mini at MobHappy


location based services

Opera’s been on a little tear recently, announcing licensing deals with a number of carriers, and yesterday, with three mobile content companies (via MocoNews that will distribute it in various places around the world. Also included in yesterday’s announcement was price-comparison service PriceRunner, with the comment “The US-based Price Runner will actively promote and distribute Opera Mini to give its users mobile access to its online product and price comparison services.”
Opera says the companies can customize Mini to reflect their branding, and add their own bookmarks and content — which takes it from being just a browser to becoming their own application, with the added bonus of delivering customers a better mobile Internet experience to boot. Opera’s done much of the heavy lifting by making Mini work across a wide range of Java mobiles, and simplified development by letting content providers develop in the Web environment they’re used to and familiar with.
This is pretty cool — common complaints about mobile development from Web developers are that it uses technologies with which they’re not familiar, and it creates results that vary across handsets. Opera seems to have done a pretty solid job of minimizing those problems, and provides companies and content providers a platform on which to build a branded experience. It’s another good example of platform thinking — taking something relatively straightforward, like a web browser, and turning it into something greater.
This is a pretty compelling solution for content providers looking to quickly and easily create their own branded application. It may not offer the same functionality as having a dedicated, native Java or smartphone app, but there are plenty of content providers that aren’t so interested in taking the time or expense to go that route. This is a development that makes the technical issues of mobile web design less of a barrier, and lets content providers focus on other conceptual — and hopefully it won’t be the last one.
Technorati Tags: opera, mobile web, mobile design, pricerunner

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