A New Browser Battle

Anyone who bet on the perpetually recycled promise that the Internet was about to find a new home on the displays of mobile phones is probably broke by now. Although beset by bad marketing and uncertain demand, the mobile Internet’s fundamental problem has been that the tiny phone screen is a lousy way to absorb information from the Net.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but that may be about to change. Opera, the tiny Norwegian upstart whose PC browser has in the last 18 months lured some 12 million customers away from products like Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, is about to release a new browser that — they swear! — will revolutionize Web surfing on small screen phones. The latest version of its mobile browser, which will be announced this week, transforms data so that a mobile-phone user can download pages using the same format as the World Wide Web. Opera has found a way to render Web pages so that a complete page can be viewed vertically on mobile screens and look the same as it does on a PC. “With our technology, mobile users can visit any page on the World Wide Web, not just special pages,” says Opera CEO Jon S. von Tetzchner.

Opera’s break-through, the latest salvo in the mobile browser wars, is part of a broader fight to dominate the wireless Web, which is heating up now that third-generation mobile phones are finally hitting the market. For now, the focus is on browser technology; the next stage, programmable phones, will spotlight mobile operating systems.

Microsoft has made no secret of its ambitions in this area, announcing in 1999 that it would develop smart phones based on a scaled-down version of its ubiquitous Windows. The first wide-scale deployment of phones running Microsoft’s software is expected to come later this month through Orange, the pan-European mobile firm owned by France Telecom. But most of the major handset manufacturers — including Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, Motorola, Matsushita (Panasonic) and Siemens — are all betting on an alternative system made by the London-based consortium Symbian. These manufacturers will want to convince consumers they can Web surf via phone without installing a mini-version of Windows.

Assuming Opera’s technology catches on, it could make big money. Earlier, cruder versions of Opera’s mobile browser are currently bundled with Symbian’s operating system. Opera gets a one-off licensing fee for each mobile phone sold with one of its browsers inside. Manufacturers in the Symbian consortium are expected to agree to use the same browser in future phones, meaning Opera’s browser could go from being in several million units to tens, even hundreds, of million phones. The competition will be fierce. In addition to proprietary systems from Microsoft and Palm, there’s a new browser packaged in Palo Alto, California-based Danger’s $200 phone, which includes a camera and e-mail and instant messaging functions. A potential dark horse in the mobile race is Oslo-based Trolltech. Trolltech’s technology is based on Linux, a system used mainly on Web servers. Because Linux technology is in the public domain, it can be easily customized for any device. Sharp is using Trolltech’s mobile version of Linux in its Zaurus SL-5500 personal digital assistant.

As the mobile browser wars rage on, billions of euros are at stake, and anxious mobile-phone operators are coveting data services, a crucial new source of revenue as voice revenues decline. “These are steps in the right direction toward mobile devices becoming a good window onto the Web,” says Ross Bott, a venture capitalist at Silicon Valley-based Redpoint Ventures. Of course, we’ve heard that song before. The fact is that about 70% of cell phones sold worldwide in 2002 are capable of surfing the Net through wireless application protocol (WAP) browsers. But almost no one does, because WAP proved to be a miserable experience rather than the magical Web in your phone that was promised. But with 900 million mobile phones on the market worldwide that will need to be upgraded, hopes for a mobile Internet will continue to spring anew. Sven Lingjaerde, president of the European Tech Tour Association, recently brought Opera and Trolltech to a group of investors on a Norwegian technology tour. He believes that Europe can yet leverage its mobile-phone strengths. “There is still a window of opportunity,” he says. But companies like Opera and Trolltech had better act fast — before the window gets slammed shut by Windows.