Opera on Mobile ...

Interview with Opera Software CEO and co-founder Jon S. von Tetzchner:

Q14. What about Opera Mini. Is that product available for Linux devices?

A14. Any device, basically. With Opera Mini, we run the browser on a server. We use a small screen rendering technology that we download onto mobile phones. We have two versions, one for powerful phones, and one for very low-powered phones. We spent a lot of time to make the Opera browser run lightly, so we can handle quite a few users with a small number of servers. It's still the biggest server park we ever made, but we are able to handle a lot of users. There's 700 million mobiles out there with Java capabilities that can download the small Java applet, and get the Internet.

Q2. How many of the embedded projects you're seeing are based on Linux?

A2. Considering both mobile and embedded devices, it's between 50 and 100. We're up to almost 50 mobile phones, for example. More and more of those are based on Linux. We've made deliveries to Motorola and ZTe for their mobile phones. We've done the Nokia 770. We do the Sharp Zaurus PDAs. We're doing IP television, bar-code readers, airplane entertainment systems, shopping carts -- all these are Linux based, by the way.

We're definitely seeing a trend toward Linux. More and more of the questions we're getting are Linux-related. We have two SDKs, and both are Linux-based. And, if you look at the number of Opera developers working on Linux, they're probably our biggest group.