Yesterday, we had a chance to meet with Philip Grønvold, Product Manager of Opera. He came to Indonesia for several occasions and we were lucky to have in-depth conversation with him. He’s a very fun guy to talk with and based on his accent, it’s truly not wrong to accuse him to have US education. He has Bachelor degree from Boston University and been with Opera for almost 5 years. The day before yesterday, he attended meetup organized by Chip Magazine and talked about mobile security.
There are a lot of interesting conversations came up here. He showed us several interesting facts about Opera, including how hard Opera tries to satisfy many kind of different mobile platforms. There are 7 platforms that are currently supported by Opera Mini and Opera Mobile. Opera even create a beta version for MeeGo, as they believe MeeGo will be a great platform for open source community as alternative to Android, although currently MeeGo is no longer Nokia’s primary operating system. Opera Mini now maybe has the largest user base in the world with more than 90 million users.
Some are them are left behind, including the decision not to bring Opera Mini 6 and Opera Mobile 11 to Windows Mobile platform, while eying the possibility of bringing theirs to latest update of Windows Phone 7, named Mango. He was also showing us a cool feature implemented on Opera Mini 6 for iOS (iPhone and iPad, which is not approved yet) where the pinch and zoom works beautifully and better flicker rate that left no checkerboarding, unlike native mobile Safari browser — or stock Android browser if compared to Android tablets series.
The main reason that brought him here — along with his mission in several Asian countries — is to urge Indonesian users that has enjoyed Opera Mini 4.2 for certain period of time to upgrade to higher version, in this case Opera Mini 6 to enjoy lot of new features without sacrificing the phone performance. Opera Mini 4.2 has major user base in Indonesia (no. 2 in the world after Russia) as most of them are installed into feature phones. There are complaints pointed at Opera by feature phone users, when they upgraded from version 4.2 to 5.0, the version 5.0 was heavily abused phone memory. One major update that is patched into Opera Mini 6 is the ability to get latest technology and better memory management.
Yes, to accommodate the fanaticism on Opera Mini 4.2, Opera creates Opera Mini 4.3 — a minor update on performance but with latest version’s look and feel. Still, the Opera Mini 4.3 won’t resemble the experience given by the higher version. Thus, Philip once again told us to send this message to the whole Opera Mini loyal consumers that the latest version will be giving better experience and not sacrificing feature phone performance which lacks of fast processor and huge amount of memories.
For smartphone users, in other hand, Philip told several new features that assured us Opera Mini 6 and Opera Mobile 11 are bringing new trend into this industry, some cool features that will be followed by other browsers in the next coming months. Talking about his opinion regarding Firefox Mobile for Android, Philip explained that his side is very excited with decision. Competition is making mobile browser war cool again, something that they doesn’t feel anymore since 2006 when Firefox ignited such thing in desktop realm. But, as Philip pointed out, Firefox Mobile for Android requires very high hardware requirement that only met by 25% of Android phones in the market. While of course Opera reaches almost 98% of the Android population targeted.
One question that being asked again and again was what’s difference between Opera Mobile and Opera Mini? In shorter words, Opera Mini performs server side optimization that is very useful for any kind of phone (feature phone and smartphone), while Opera Mobile is doing the performance in client side — definitely requires something savvy. Also Opera Mobile needs to access some low level layers, which is not always allowed by manufacturers. Apple for example doesn’t want third party to have such privilege, that’s why there’s no Opera Mobile in iOS.
I have tried using Opera Mini 6 in my smartphone and definitely amazed by the performance and experience. The application has taken back my favor in term of browsing, compared to native browser. I should thanked the Opera Team for their hard working implementing this ultimate version.
By the way, for closure, a question about Opera-Telkomsel collaboration was asked to Daud Aditirto, Director, Business Development, Opera Indonesia, and he answered that although the Telkomsel logo is no longer appeared in the loading page, the collaboration of the duo is still carried on. Telkomsel still offers Opera Mini package for unlimited monthly access. Hope that answers your curiosity on this matter.
