Wednesday, June 20th, 2007
Mobile Ajax News: iPhone and Opera Mini
In Mobile Ajax new, more details on the iPhone were made available, and Opera released a beta of its Opera Mini 4 browser.
Opera Mini 4
Opera has given us 10 reasons to love Opera Mini 4 which includes:
- Surf the Web in style
- “X marks the spot” — start at the right place
- Stay at the right place
- A virtual mouse
- Power scrolling
- Fast and cheap browsing
- Good old Small Screen Rendering
- Quick access to key functionality with the context menu
- Web designers go wild
They have tried to be funny with an obligatory iPhone movie.
iPhone Browser Capabilities and Guidelines
Speaking of th iPhone, information on the browser capabilities has been released and includes restrictions:
- 10MB max html size for web page
- Javascript limited to 5 seconds run time
- Javascript allocations limited to 10MB
- 8 documents maximum loaded on the iPhone due to page view limitations
- Quicktime used for audio and video
- No Java
- No Flash
and in features:
- the page view feature lets you look at multiple websites and documents by scrolling thru them one after another
- Full PDF support
- double tap for zoom in
- one finger as a mouse used to
- two fingers as a mouse used to
- new telephone links allows you to integrate phone calls directly from your webpage. remember this is only on safari.
- built in google maps client for integrated mapping from your website
3.2 rating from 23 votes
Seems as though Apple has striken those details from the two linkbacks…I guess you can expect them to contact you as well :-)
what Apple meant to say about making phone calls directly from a web page is that Safari does it differently than the norm, which is “tel:1234567890″
I love the idea of Opera Mini; I would love to put Heap (http://heaphq.com) on there as well as the iPhone (which it already works on). But it seems that Mini is not just a small version of the desktop browser, its quite limited. For instance it has trouble with tables of all things. So, I don’t really think this is something apple has to worry about. But gosh, I wish this was as the title suggest an equivalent product, that would open the world up to a lot more mobile users.
This is a very slick mobile browser (BETA, nonetheless!), and I’m impressed :)
@Ben Smith: Tables seem to be displaying perfectly fine for me, including table based layouts and normal tables used in content. Can you elaborate on the issues you have?
i’m sorry to disrupt your illusion that opera mini supports mobile ajax. it does not an has never, just opera mobile supports mobile ajax requests!
this is a test
Please elaborate “finger as a mouse used to”; it makes little sense to me, whether prefixed “one”, “two” or any other number.
opera mini can’t be compaired to iphone’s safari, though opera mobile can, and i see it is superior to iphone’s safari for many things.
opera mini isn’t exactly a browser, it retrieve data as second hand from operamini servers after shrinking pages so it can fit in any mobile memory, also it is much faster for the same reason.
From a web applications standpoint, I would prefer safari on iphone. From a web browsing standpoint, I’m more doubtful. Opera mini’s shrinking and reformatting of page contents is something you can only do with an intermediate server, and it really does work great. I have a suspicion that browsing on the iphone (over edge, not wifi) is going to be an exercise in patience.
It consistently crashes my Treo650. — This beta should have spent more time in alpha.
This is great, I bought it already and I’m happy with it. I tell u people buy it very good thing.
You might want to hold fire on saying Opera Mini 4.0 (Beta) doesn’t use AJAX.
I have been pulling my hair out trying to work out how mobile phones using NetFront 3.2 and etc have been using AJAX on my site. Phones made in 2004 without Symbian OS using AJAX???
It wasn’t until I noticed these devices were using Opera Mini 4.0.
How it translates the functionality of AJAX to your mobile is another question.
May have jumped the gun there. All the information I can find indicates Opera Mini 4 (Beta) does not support AJAX. Information does indicate that it supports XSLT and XPath though.