I know that 2006 and every year that came before it was supposed to be “the year of the mobile web”. Maybe it’s time to change that a little. 2007 will be the year of “The Real Internet.”
As with most things mobile, “The Real Internet” has been available on Nokia devices since 2006 in the form of the Nokia Mobile Browser, based on the same open-source technology as the iPhone‘s Safari.
Later this month, Apple will unleash “The Real Internet” on its iPhone to much fanfare.
Today Opera released a beta version of its new mobile browser that aims to bring “The Real Internet” to all devices that can run J2ME. This means that “The Real Internet” can come to a wide range of devices, be they computing monsters or low-end free-on-contract phones. The new version of Opera Mini allows users to zoom in and out much like Safari on the iPhone (albeit in a much less sexy way). There is a video demo and an online emulator if you’d like to check it out.
So there it is, 2007 (or 2006 in Finland) seems to be shaping up to be the year of “The Real Internet.”
Comments
6 responses to “2007: The year of “The Real Internet””
I wonder how many more years will be declared “The Year Of The Mobile Web” before we realise that, hey, hardly anyone actually wants it? At least not in the forms it’s currently available in.
If hardly anyone actually wants it, how come Opera Mini has 15 million users and counting, and the mobile web browser market in general is exploding in size?
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> If hardly anyone actually wants it, how come Opera Mini has 15 million users and counting, and the mobile web browser market in general is exploding in size?
I must admit, I don’t know much about the mobile phone market. But when I say “hardly anyone”, I mean as a proportion of the entire population. In his January Macworld keynote, Steve Jobs said that, in 2006, 956 million mobile phones were sold. 15 million Opera mobile users is 1.5% of that.
Then we’ve got all the mobile phone owners who didn’t buy theirs in 2006, and I’d query whether 15 million people use Opera mobile regularly, or whether it’s been downloaded 15 million times.
I’m not saying mobile web access is useless. I reckon in a few years many of us won’t know how we lived without it. But most of what I do on the internet is general information-gathering. I can’t see people wanting to do that in a mobile context very much. Quickly getting specific bits of data (e.g. train times, bar locations), yeah.
Plus, at the moment, data can be very expensive depending on your country and mobile phone network.
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