Ok, so anyone out there who has ever used the WAP browsers availible on most phones know that the WAP Protocol is complete and utter crap. For those of you that don't know what WAP is, it is supposed to be a way for simple mobile phones to browse the "wireless web" except that the content on the "wireless web" is completely useless. In comes Opera Mini! It's a java application made for WAP enabled mobile phones that lets you browse the real www! Some of you more technically enlightened folks might be asking, "But GHackett, my WAP phone only lets me download very small files. How could this program view real web pages without downloading all those big picture files?" Well that's the brilliance of this app/service. All pages viewed in this app are actually processed by a backend server owned by opera. The images are re-sized and compressed, and the pages are stripped down and optimized before they ever reach your phone!!! This means that pages load faster because the phone doesn't have to process them and it doesnt have to load any of the big ticket items!!! I've installed this app onto my brand new SonyEricsson k750i (which is freakin awsome btw) and it worked like a charm. I visited google, superpages, yellowbook, and wikipedia and even though they sometimes display a little funny (pages are optimized to fit on your screen) you get all the functionality of the pages. It's the best thing to happen to mobile phones since Dope Wars! Ok, so there are some hiccups, but only because cell phone carriers are complete idiots. I have T-mobile, so I cannot garuntee that this will work on other carriers (I would assume it should on Cingular, but Verizon and Sprint are questionable). Secondly, the phone I have is not actually offered by T-Mobile. Rather it is an unlocked import phone. If I was using a phone that I bought from t-mobile, this application wouldn't work becuase T-Mobile does not let java apps access the internet on their phones. This is something I learned with my old motorola. As far as I know, the only way to bypass this retarted feature is to have you phone unlocked by t-mobile. I have never done this but from what I understand it should be possible as long as you have been with them for at least 30 days. The third little hiccup is that this app has not been officially released in the USA. So you will not be able to download it from opera is you are on a US carrier. However there are a ton of mirrors for this app so if you do a goggle search for the model number of your phone and 'Opera Mini' you should be able to find it. If you donwload the jar or jad to you PC but don't know how to transfer it to your phone, there is a great website called mobstorage.com. From there you can upload a file from your PC, and then download it to your mobile phone using the item number its spits out (they explain it on the site). Well that's my news today. It may not be new but it's fabulous and every java enabled phone should have it!
Later Bloggerinoes
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