While many IntoMobile readers carry mid to high end smartphones, most of the known world uses feature phones since they’re cheaper and also tend to last longer since they’re designed to be used in countries with extreme climate conditions. All you Twitter and Facebook addiction shouldn’t underestimate the popularity of plain old voice calls and text messages. That being said, with time feature phones have become remarkably advanced. Just look at Nokia’s latest batch of “Touch and Type” devices that get rid of the once loved directional pad in favor of a touch screen. Yes, it isn’t capacitive, and yes, it’s rather small, but at least it’s marked progress. This new generation of feature phones still has issues however in terms of processing power. That becomes apparent when one tries to browse the internet and is stuck waiting, almost forever, for a page to load. The Norwegians over at Opera Software solved this problem with Opera Mini. Their solution was to render web pages on a fast server in a datacenter close to the user, compress said pages by up to 90%, and then transmit the final bits to your mobile phone. Now it looks like they’ve got a competitor, and they’re not a small player either.
Back in March of last year Nokia purchased Chicago based Novarra, a company we never heard of, but offered a similar web proxy solution to that of Opera Mini. Looks like it took 12 months for Nokia to make something of that acquisition since their technology is now bundled in the latest browser beta for S40, Nokia’s feature phone operating system. Nokia says the same thing the folks at Opera say, that pages will be squeezed down by around 90%, and since Nokia tends to pre-bundle Opera Mini on their feature phones we wonder why they’d even bother building their own proxy based browser? Probably to build one of the largest ad networks this side of Timbuktu.