Three In a Row

Lots of updates to other bits of the Wiki, but only three things worth some comments:

  • Opera has come up with a "better" approach to mobile browsing, using Opera Mini - a J2ME front-end to proxy servers that dish up pre-converted content. In order to avoid openly joining the "let's bypass the carriers" club, it's offering the service through them (haven't the faintest about the licensing fees involved). The "split browser" approach has been tried before (remember Blazer and the early Palm browsers that worked through a proxy?), but most solutions failed due to lack of traction. /MIDP has evolved to the point where it can be used for this successfully, but it will always be a niche approach.
  • After podcasting, we get Internet - of sorts. I wonder how long until some enterprising soul wires this to a BitTorrent feed serving real series...
  • In the meantime, the official firmware was updated to 2.3 Release 63, which is supposed to support 16/32 and NTFS. I'm curious as to how long it will take for this to be ported to the "open" variants, and how full (and stable) this NTFS support will turn out to be - since it wasn't a trivial thing to implement on mainstream in the first place. I would have settled for "official" Ext3 support, instead of the "vanilla" Ext2 it still has - there's no journal in my "standard" box.