Adaptive Path Blog

Next week will see all of the big players (and most of the small ones) in Barcelona. They are gathering for the Mobile World Congress conference. You can expect to see all kinds of interesting announcements from device manufacturers and carriers. It’s already rumored that a prototype running Google’s Android will be on display.

This week two early announcements caught my eye. Funambol will be showing off new push email and sync services. I really like this company because they bring what are traditionally enterprise-only services to the masses via open source development. For example, they recently announced over-the-air sync services for the iPhone via both a web-app and a native app for “jailbroken” devices. Instead of relying on Apple to give its users this service, Funambol rallied the open source community to solve the problem. Similarly, Windows Mobile users (like me) who don’t have access to Microsoft’s Exchange Server can use their sync app/service in place of the native ActiveSync. Funambol is partnering with ISP’s and carriers to bring products to users as well as developing Android apps for the next generation of devices. Like Google, they are embracing open source in order to change the marketplace of mobile and this change will only help users who are clamoring for better and more usable apps on their smartphones.

Yesterday, Opera Mobile 9.5 was previewed and all I can say is WOW. Read Write Web has a good breakdown of the new features and below is a video showing off the soon-to-be-released browser. Just like mobile Safari, this version of Opera Mobile displays real web pages and allows the user to zoom in for reading detail. Unlike the iPhone, this browser supports Flash Lite. I am also intrigued by the opportunities that offline browsing and the widget support offers. If you subscribe to the notion that a web browser will be the center of a great mobile experience, then you have see Opera as a strong player here. The feature set of this browser offers a framework to replace most every function of a mobile operating system. Additionally, they are beating the latest mobile IE (Deepfish) to the market and Firefox mobile is just getting started. Opera Mobile is a mature product now and is leading the pack for user- and developer-focused features.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 9:19 pm and is filed under Development, Mobile, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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