Opera to put widgets on mobile phones

Famous for promising to swim to the USA from Norway if users downloaded one million copies of his browser, Opera CEO Jon S. Von Tetzchner is one man who thinks differently about the web browser space.

His latest venture is putting web applications -- in the form of Opera widgets -- in mobile phones, TVs, game consoles and car stereo displays.

In fact, if a device has a screen, Von Tetzchner wants to provide the technology that can hook it up to the internet and display info of your choice pulled from the internet and presented in bite-sized chunks.

Despite having a tiny share of the desktop browser market, Tetzchner is more likely than anyone in the world to succeed in bringing web applications to mobile phones. The Opera Browser is already the #1 used browser on mobiles.

I tracked him down on annual leave in Iceland (where his mother is known to make a mean hot chocolate) and spoke to him over a scratchy Skype connection about his plans for widgetizing the world's devices.

Dan Warne: When Opera revealed its widget rendering engine in Opera 9, I imagine a lot of people wondered why Opera would do that, when it’s a space that’s already well established by Apple with Dashboard, Microsoft with Vista Gadgets and Yahoo Widgets.

But your recent news about putting widgets on mobile devices makes everything a lot clearer... because obviously Opera has been very successful in that space already. Can you talk about your plan there?

Jon S. Von Tetzchner: Well the idea is that you are obviously able to write applications using web standards … people already know how to write things using them. There is a trend on the desktop towards web applications, and our thinking is that web applications should be standards-based.

Then you have the benefit that you can write a web application and have it run anywhere… on your mobile phone, on your game console, on your TV. Wherever you’d have a web browser.

Dan: What actually is the "Opera Platform" in terms of the components that run on the phone? What bits of a mobile phone operating system does it replace or add to?

Jon: Well, the platform is something that we’ve been working on for some time and the idea is that you can connect quite closely with the rest of the device’s operating system.

We’ve actually made the user interface using the browser, but it ties in with other applications running on the phone like the contacts, and so on. So you have the front screen being the browser and if someone calls you, and there’s a missed call, then we can display information retrieved from other parts of the phone operating system. All that can be customised.

And we’re doing that with Javascript Plugins, which basically allow you to take things that are binary on the platform and make them available through the browser. The user doesn’t really see it as the browser, of course, it’s just that the platform is written with the browser technology.

The technology was devised for set-top boxes originally, because when you and creating web apps for a set-top box, you would like to be able to do things like controlling volume, changing channels and so on from the browser. We provide that through the Javascript Plugins.

Dan Warne: so you’re really creating another abstraction layer between applications running on the mobile phone and the hardware.

Jon: Well, yes, but more importantly we are also creating an abstraction layer between applications and the device’s operating system and other pieces of software.

Dan Warne: so how will widgets work in terms of being presented on different screen sizes? Will it be a case of developers having to create versions of widgets for different screen sizes, or will you urge developers to make them easily scalable? It seems like a hard problem to make a widget scale from a mobile phone screen to a high definition TV…

Jon: Well, we have zooming technology in Opera, so you can always zoom them [which preserves resolution if the widget is made of vector-based graphics]. But I would suggest that developers keep screen size in mind. So even though we are able to do the transformations, I think probably if you want to make widgets for different screen sizes you want to preserve your control over how the space is best used and the information is displayed.

But with the technologies we’re using like CSS and media queries, where you can actually get all the information about the screen size and device your code is formatting to, it is not going to be too difficult to have their widgets adjust automatically depending on the device they’re running on.

But again, we can zoom it up and zoom it down. Even if it’s too big, we can still fit it on a smaller screen and vice versa, though if you think about the size of screens with actual applications, I think developers need to think about it.

Dan: I suppose with mobile phones there’s a fairly small range of screen resolutions that are typically used anyway so I guess it’s a case of developers simply anticipating a range of 120 - 240 pixels for mobile phones.

Jon: I think you can more or less do that in a lot of cases and you can also fit them to the screen. You don’t want to use fixed width, because you might have a screen that is very high resolution and then a fixed width widget wouldn’t be able to take advantage of that. Also, developers have to take into account situations like displays with higher per-inch resolution, like a display that is 400 pixels wide but the same physical size as a 100 pixel one. Unless you see very well, you’re not going to be able to read it.

Dan: One of the things that has attracted my attention to Opera as an organization recently is Opera Mini, because in my opinion it has made browsing on fairly underpowered mobile phones with tiny screens and slow and expensive GPRS a perfectly satisfying experience.

That's quite a revolution because in the past mobile web browsing has been annoyingly slow and expensive: you’re sucking down a lot of data that the phone can’t really process fast enough, and then you get hit with a huge bill at the end of the month.

The way Opera Mini uses a proxy at Opera to pre-process web pages for display on a mobile is very clever, but clearly it’s an interim solution to the fact that the web isn't well designed for mobile devices. Do you see widgets as a way of moving the world on from the idea of trying to squeeze the “desktop web” onto mobile phones?

Jon: That’s definitely part of it. Obviously, once you have downloaded a widget, it stays on your phone and handles all the formatting of the data, so you’re not constantly re-downloading formatting information. Your phone just sends and receives the raw data and the widget handles the presentation. That’s all quite possible using XMLHTTPrequest, so widgets are much lower on data usage than viewing web pages on mobile phones previously.

Dan: Mobile web browsers have typically been pretty rudimentary bits of software… they haven’t typically supported AJAX, or at a more basic level even Javascript, very well, so the idea of doing widgets using AJAX on mobiles is quite a leap. Does it require a much more powerful mobile processor?

Jon: No, the platform is designed to run on the low-cost mobiles that are out today. Basically, the core of the platform is Opera, so we’ve been running it on phones that are really not that powerful for some time.

Dan: Have you had much uptake yet by device manufacturers?

Jon: There is interest. I think when it comes to the Opera Platform, it will take a longer time, because you would like it to run across all devices. It’s why we did Opera Mini. We implemented it on a lot of phones before the network operators would actually take it. It takes a while to get started but it’s now starting to be included on a lot of phones. I’m optimistic about Opera Platform but it will take time.

Dan: Opera is a very profitable company isn’t it, despite your tiny share of the desktop market. It seems you’ve built a very successful business around mobile devices.

Jon: We think we are doing alright! We have been growing the company a lot but at the same time we have been profitable for 2003, 2004 and 2005, and we aim to keep it that way. As a company, we have been increasing revenues every year between 30 and 50 per cent every year for 10 years.

Dan: In terms of growing your business, what do you see the challenges are at the moment for mobile handset makers and network operators in terms of making devices that work well with the internet?

Jon: I think that the main thing is processor speed. The faster they are, the better, but as I said earlier, our requirements now aren’t that much. Bigger screens and higher resolution screens just provide a better experience. It’s the same sort of challenges you have with a home computer. If you have DSL and a fast computer you get a better experience than someone with dialup and an old computer.

Overall, though, it’s not like they have to do a lot to start using Opera Platform and making better use of internet services on mobiles in general, and everyone is going in that direction, that’s for sure.

Dan: Are there versions of the Opera Mobile Platform that enthusiasts could download and install onto particular models of phone and experiment with?

Jon: not at this stage. We don’t have a publicly available download at this time. [Though interested developers can download the SDK here.]

Dan: What about widgets for TVs and other screened devices that don’t typically have web browsers on them? What sort of hardware would a TV manufacturer need to put in to support the Opera platform?

Jon: In many ways it’s the same type of hardware, a 100MHz CPU, a little bit of RAM and storage. The requirements are very low.

Dan: And I suppose this is an area where NVIDIA’s mobile GPUs would start to come into the fore? NVIDIA’s recent GoForce 5500 mobile phone GPU can support 1024x768 resolution, and when you think about phones it’s going to be a long while before they have that kind of res. But if you think about high definition TVs I guess there’s a market right there.

Jon: Yes, while I think overall you are seeing both in mobiles and in consumer electronics overall an increase in resolution on screens. Of course, in mobiles, you are seeing manufacturers packing more and more pixels onto screens so you get a higher quality display. And that will continue at a rapid pace because you have to remember that mobile screen resolution is still a lot less than that of, well, paper… so there is still some way to go in terms of visual clarity.

Dan: yes, I guess people haven’t warmed to carrying round giant mobile phones with big screens but they may be attracted by a mobile phone with a very high quality screen.

Jon: Yes. I mean, some people wouldn’t mind a bigger screen, and you’re starting to see that in some of the new phones, but most people, for a normal phone, they don’t want it to be that big.

Dan: Microsoft is obviously pushing into this space as well with Windows Sideshow, which runs on the PortalPlayer chips that the iPod was designed around. Is that a direct competitor with the Opera Platform?

Jon: Well, in one way it is, but our thinking is to do everything based on open-standards, and that way you can have any platform running it underneath. You then get significant flexibility: you can use Opera Platform on Microsoft devices, but you don’t have to. People are really looking hard at browsing technology now in many less obvious spaces. For example, in-flight entertainment operators are looking at how they can build web browsing into seat-back displays. And of course it makes sense to use the browser as your operating environment with web applications running on top of it.

Dan: Yes, it seems that convergence has been happening for a long time but it seems like very soon we really will have an iPod that is a mobile phone that is a PDA that is a video player that is a mobile web browser. I guess the time is really ripe now to get a toehold in the operating systems that will drive these converged devices.

Jon: Given the direction that things are going, it is certainly the right direction for us to be going in. Not to be a standard, I mean, obviously we wouldn’t mind being one, but we want to do the best possible solution based on open standards, and we hope people choose it because it does the job better.

Dan: One final question Jon. Will you be doing any long distance swims to promote the Opera Mobile platform?

Jon: You know, I learned a lesson from last time. I think it would be fun to swim to Australia, but based on past experience I probably wouldn’t get that far.