Opera Mini 4.1 beta

Opera Mini is already aiming for its next release - 4.1 - and its beta is already out. If you follow this blog you know that I'm an user and fan of Opera Mini, but I'm still using Opera Mini 3, since Opera Mini 4 doesn't have an option of having the "mobile view" sliced in pages, like Opera Mini 3 has, and v4 eats too much memory trying to load an huge page at once, failing to do so and stoping me of using it to browse in my Motorola E1 cellphone.

Now that Opera announced the beta version of Opera Mini 4.1, I just had to try it. It comes with great new features:

• autocomplete of URLs
• offline access
• search for text within a web page
• download and upload files

The default search engine switched from Yahoo! back to Google (which is great, for me at least). Also, it is way quicker (enhancements were made server-side), and consumes a lot less memory (so, 4.1 fixes my issue with 4, and is going to replace my Opera Mini 3 installation). Yet, Opera Mini 4.1, even in "mobile view" mode, is slower than Opera Mini 3.

Regarding to the "beta" state of this release, like what happened with Opera Mini 4, beta really means beta: just to test out all this things, but nothing more than that, I had to fire up the browser four times because it kept crashing. So, it's still not to use, but I'm surely upgrade as soon as the final version is released.

mobile literature

e-books? Audiobooks? Yes, I understand their importance in a world in evolution, but it's not my kind of things, at least yet. Some years ago I was quite fond of printing stuff to read: I couldn't even think of reading a book in the screen. I read Underground [1] entirely by printing it in an old plotter that printed pages way more slower than I would read them. Oh, and I wasn't able to do multitasking, so I was reading another book while printing that one. Years later I read quite some magazines and short stories in the screen (computer or more recently on mobile phone), but never a novel. I was quite surprised to see such an huge adoption of audiobooks in Germany when I was there a couple of months ago.

A couple of days ago I read an article and lot's of controversial arguments around it: basicly the story is around the fact that half of Japan's top-10 selling works of fiction in the first six months of the year were composed the same way - on the tiny handset of a mobile phone [2]. Now, after a couple of days my mind is still thinking of this, and I have not very strong but mixed feelings about this. Some say that this is the evolution of the language. Others say that this is going to kill culture. Above that, I think more about if is this an Asian trend or if it will move onto Europe and America, also if isn't this what's going to be the next pop movements. The business model and the success of it doesn't surprise me, tho: after all you can make all kind of parallels between this and MegaTokyo [3], for instance. But I don't know... Is this good? Is this bad? Will be a new method to release good new books? Are the books made this way already released any good? (Most critics say no, but I'm curious to read one or two to make my own mind...)

Yes, I still have to think a lot about this issue. But, in the meanwhile... What are your thoughts on the issue?

[1] - http://www.underground-book.com/
[2] - http://smallr.net/japan-mobile-books
[3] - http://smallr.net/megatokyo

One more round of links

• I was going to write about this since monday, but since I didn't find the time to, where's a link [1] to someone who did: Google Translate (which few people use, but still) has an awsome new feature: user generated translations. I see lots of potential in this, which I might explore later...
• The Portuguese mashup Twitternotes won the title of mashup of the day [2].
• Using OPIE - One Time Passwords [3]...
• asql - Query Apache logfiles via SQL [4]
• Music delivered to mobile phones will hit $11 billion and account for 30% of music sales by 2011 [5] according to a new report. Mobile is currently 14% of revenue for labels.
• Second Life's residents age verification is now up [6], in beta. Until it is a beta feature it will be optional, but what is going to happen after that? It's not that hard to guess...

[1] - http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/015537.html
[2] - http://alcides.ideias3.com/blog/204
[3] - http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/568
[4] - http://www.steve.org.uk/Software/asql/
[5] - http://news.yahoo.com/s/cmp/20071205/tc_cmp/204700372
[6] - http://smallr.net/SL-age-verification

The future of mobile

Using my cell phone as an Internet terminal, using my laptop as a music player, I read Raph Koster's blog where he talks about a panel discussing the future of mobile, with his own comments and thoughts about it. Something's wrong here, but it's not the fact that I'm reading his blog using the cell phone. What's wrong here is that I have to listen to music using the computer, since my cell phone doesn't let you multi task browsing with listening to music (something I shall fix when I replace my mobile phone), and the fact that Raph Koster says (and others agree) that mobiles, as any other device, should focus on doing what's their main purpose, and not everything else.

I totally agree that the best tool to take a picture is a camera. Like the best tool to see television is a TV screen, and the best way to see a movie is in a theatre and the best way to listen to recorded music is using some HiFi system. But most of the people, most of the times, don't really want to do one thing in the best way, they want to do several things without much pain. Yeah, it would be great to listen to this CD at home*, with enough candle lights to read the inners and a glass of red wine. But it would suck if I couldn't listen to it now just because I'm on a train. Yes, I would have a better experience reading Raph's blog in the laptop than in the mobile screen, but, on the other hand, I would only be able to do it if I was using my cell phone as a modem, which would consume my laptop's battery faster and leave me to no music earlier. Of course I could pay five more Euros and travel first class just to have a power plug... Oh, did I said mobile phone as modem? Right, I could have one of those PCMCIA or USB mobile Internet cards, but why have them if my cell phone just does the same thing? Oh, and pictures? Most mobile phones in Portugal already have the ability to take them, and, curiously, most people** that heavily use that feature are those who have good cameras and pleasure in making photography. But you don't walk with your camera everywhere, and there's that "casual picture" you like to take for which your cell phone does a quite decent job...

About MMO's in mobile phones: I've done it via telnet or web browser, and I was a player of "the first mobile MMORPG" (or at least that's what they said they were): TibiaME. My experiences? Via web browser it sucks, but that's basicly because I wasn't doing it to go to web MMO's (I don't like any of those I know), and I still have to see a web interface for an MMO that I like (the best would be one of those Second Life interfaces out there, but unfortunately I don't see any of them to be at least as good interface-wise as SLTalker, and yes, SLTalker still sucks...). The telnet experience is pretty good: it isn't better just because I still have to find a telnet-ssl client for mobile phones (or write one). TibiaME... Wasn't a good experience, but that's because the game design isn't that appealing (I was somewhat turned off when I noticed that TibiaME's worlds weren't connected to Tibia's ones) and, specially, because the application (still a beta) was pretty buggy, crashing all the time. So, do I think that mobile phones have what it takes to be a great medium for MMO's? I don't have any doubt. The fun in Virtual Worlds comes with the fact that you have one (or more) avatars, that have their own virtual life in their own virtual world. But if they can't live when you aren't home... Now, with your mobile virtual world, your avatar can be alive and awake as much time as you can yourself... If you think that there's no market at there, look at Katherine, the teen girl that wrote the first web interface for Second Life just to be able to be on while using her school's computers... Give their generation a SL mobile client and you'll see it being an instant success.

As the panel itself, I just have to say: please treat your gardens but burn its walls. There's no "company space" in the future of web, if you take into account that what matters nowadays on the web is data.

*) I'm listening to the only album from the Portuguese musical project "Ambience", that is threatening to be considered by me as the best Portuguese musical act... I should talk more about it in a later post.

**) This is assumed by me, from experience and observation. It isn't based in any study and can be flawed... But I don't think so.

Thoughs on Opera Mini 4

For frequent readers of this blog there's no surprise on the fact that I am a fan of mobile computing: I use a cheap mobile phone (Motorola E1 Rokr) as a modem, SSH client and as a web browser. To do so I use a simple setup: the mobile' stock functionality to work as a modem, MidpSSH as a SSH and telnet client (BTW, if you know of any alternative to this one that lets you choose the port instead of assuming the default ports for this services, I appreciate), and Opera Mini as a mobile web browser.

I use Opera Mini as a web browser for the cellphone since more or less one month after I got it, and I was kindly surprised by it: it obviously surpasses the poor browser that comes stocked with the cellphone. At last years' XTech I talked with an Opera guy working on Mini and talked about some flaws I thought it had, but I was happy with the browser, and, as I told him, I believed Opera Mini would be the mobile browser of choice (Opera Mobile isn't for me, like any other non-free_as_in_beer browser) at least until the Mozilla Foundation didn't start a serious effort in the field. At the time I was using Opera Mini 2, which was quickly replaced by Opera Mini 3: a not-so-major improovement in terms of usability, and with a change that I didn't like: the default search engine (that can't be changed) is Yahoo! Search (which - sorry - I can't get used too, as I also talked about earlier on this blog, regarding to search I'm addicted to Google). But, overall, it was a nice update, and I started using the mobile browser more and more... And relying on it for a great number of things.

Opera Mini 4 promises a cool few number of things. I've tried the first beta but it was too unstable, I've tried the second beta but, while better, was still worse (in terms of stability/usability) than Opera Mini 3. One cool thing Opera guys decided to do was to make Opera Mini 4 another application and not just another version (which lets Opera Mini 3 cohexist with Opera Mini 4 in the same mobile phone), and each time another beta version comes out you'll be prompted to upgrade (I hope they'll do this until the final version is out). I wasn't using Opera Mini 4 much, but...

This past week I started to really need to use a ill designed web application that didn't work on Opera Mini 3. Opera Mini 4 beta 2 was having some issues, but since it prompted me to upgrade to beta 3 I did it, and not only it solved my problem (now I can actually use that application, even if some stuff doesn't work) but it solved most of the problems I had with previous versions.

Opera Mini 4 comes with a really nice set of features, like "web view" vs. "mobile view", landscape view (gives you an horizontal screen instead of a vertical one) and fullscreen, giving you more active area and content displayed. I decided that that's what I really wanted/needed, so I decided to ditch Opera Mini 3 and starting to use Opera Mini 4. Well, now I have a bigger problem: Opera Mini 4 is completely useless for some of the websites I visit the most with Opera Mini 3, I only know it when it is too late, and I'll need to restart the browser if I stumble across one of those websites. What makes it worse is that it happens because Opera Mini 4 misses one Opera Mini 3 critical feature: the division of pages in "mobile view".

Let me explain: when in mobile view we're viewing stuff as Opera Mini 3 did. Opera Mini 3 seems the amount of data to display, and if it is more than a certain value, it breaks that content into several pages. That makes you able to load a webpage with hundreds of Kb's of data, because it will load just the first set, and then when you go to the next page or the previous page it loads that set. That actually means that not only navigation (while in a set) is quickier, but, more importantly, it means that you can load a 1Mb page because it will split it in chunks with certainly less than 100K each and display each one at a time. If you try to load that page in Opera Mini 4 what will happen is that you'll browser will try to load all that 1Mb of data... and make your cellphone run out of memory.

So, dear Opera Mini coders, can you please give me that wonderful feature back? Please? If you don't do it I'll have to keep being a user of both Opera Mini 3 and 4... And pray that you don't decide to take Opera Mini 3 out of air for when I switch to another cellphone.

Mobile in Web 2.0 Expo Berlin

Mobile to Web and Back: Designing for People

Great presentation, this guy really knows how to say what I think about mobile :-) Mobile's the future, not because it is a trend but because that's what makes sense... I really need to take this guy (Kwame Ferreira) to Portugal and speak about this, maybe you'll have more news about it soon :-)

The Impact of Mobile Web 2.0 on the Telecoms Industry

This could be an interesting presentation, but after the previous one I cannot think any other word to describe it but "boring". Also, this guy doesn't really grasp where's the value for mobile operators. He thinks that when a user takes a picture with a mobile phone and automaticly sends it to flickr, operators have nothing to win with it. He calls this a problem and thinks that people shouldn't have the content to migrate from the Operator to the interweb... something like "as a user I love it, as an operator I hate it"... I really think that Operators should love it too! His problem is simply that he divides "Mobile Internet" from "Internet", and both are the same. Wake up!

Mobile Firefox

Two years ago I was talking with some Opera folks about browsers and the rising of the mobile browsing market. I told them that, while I was an Opera Mini user, I was really sad with that fact, because I would rather use an Open Source browser. We further discussed about the state of MiniMo: a project that few of you will remember but that stands for "Mini Mozilla", had two developers, and then only one. Of course it never went far. What surprises me is that today I'm reading about Minimo dyeing... and Mozilla creating a new project: Mobile Firefox. YAY!

Now, the not so good news: they're aiming to a minimum requirement of 64Mb of RAM. Now, that's really a lot more than Opera Mini requirements... And more than what my actual mobile phone has :-(

Read the announcement at http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/schrep/archives/2007/10/mozilla_and_mobile.html.

Designing for the Web with mobile devices in mind

Paulo Silva has an excelent introduction to the "W3C Mobile Web Best Practices". Since I find this an extremely important issue, and mostly disregarded, I took the liberty of translating his article from Portuguese to English. All kudos should go to him for the article, my job here is merely that of translation.

Those that nowadays produce web content must have in mind that lots of the accesses are made from mobile terminals, like cellphones, PDAs and such other devices, where limitations are big.

To reflect that, W3C has being compiling the “Mobile Web Best Practices” that gather a set of techniques to make the mobile devices experience more joyful.

MWBP Working Group's work can be followed at http://www.w3.org/blog/BPWG/ and the first documents are already available:

Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 - Basic Guidelines document

“specifies best practices for Web content when accessed from mobile devices“

MobileOK Basic Tests 1.0

“defines machine tests based on the Best Practices to help identify Web content developed with mobile devices in mind; these tests fits in the larger mobileOK marks scheme“

At the moment there's a beta “validator” that, for curiosity, I used to test http://m.gmail.com with the following results. It's important to note that, besides being beta, this “validator” implements only 34 of the 60 directives.

I take the opportunity to leave you a link to a set of articles from Roger Johansson about developing content for mobile devices.

More links

Sorry, still busy. Here's another set of links, for your weekend:

• Second Life is going to get more ubiquous;
• Want to contribute to Open Source but don't know how?
• How do you define a cultural work?
• More on Steve Jobs and DRM;
• Music execs criticise DRM systems;
• An awsome prediction on the future of Second Life (in Portuguese);

Portugal started the deployment of the "citizen card". Here are some links:

• Concerns;
• Software.

Have a nice weekend :-)