Blogs are for narcissists

I know I recently said that cellphone software is categorically just bad. I now found some exceptions: Opera Mini and Google Maps.

Google Maps for mobile phones is impressive because it actually works on mobile phones. (quite well - I actually prefer the interface to the other versions)

Opera Mini, on the other hand, is absolutely amazing. If you haven’t downloaded it yet, then please do so right now. Opera Mini uses a special proxy on opera’s servers somewhere that strips out stuff that won’t work on your phone, resizes images, compresses everything and sends it all to your phone in some efficient proprietary binary format.

This means that mobile phones can actually browse sites like wikipedia quite effectively and you can even use the “normal” basic gmail. (no more crappy wap stuff) I mostly use gmail, wikipedia and imdb from my mobile phone, because that’s the tipe of information I’m likely to need (read: want) when I’m not near a pc. Oh yeah.. and because everything gets compressed so much you don’t miss high speed links and your bandwidth costs go down a lot. (mobile bandwidth is typically a lot more expensive than “normal” bandwidth)

Opera Mini’s interface is very intuitive and generally userfriendly - especially if you compare it to the official browsers that are bundled with mobile phones which usually hides the “insert address” field at least three menus deep.

Opera Mini is really really good. I mean Firefox good, only for mobile phones.