...is that it may be convenient, and enables the web on mid-range phones, but it hands a marketing opportunity to Apple on a plate, whose sales droids and fanboys can go around saying, quite correctly, "Well, it's not the *real* web, is it?"

Looks pretty real to me... It handles regular web pages, from regular web servers, at regular sizes if necessary, and does it well. If you want Ajax, then there's always Opera Mobile (although not on Android yet, obviously).

I think this is more a move to get a foot in the door. If Opera can impress device makers enough with the Opera Mini product this will buy them enough time to port over Opera Mobile 9 (which is still in development) and use that. Opera Mini caters to relativly low spec devices, however Android devices will have more room for "full web" applications such as Opera Mobile.

What people are missing about this news is that MicroEmulator has been ported over to Android, hence the world and it's dog of J2ME applications can now run on Android. Good and bad news for everyone.

I can read this article and comment on it from Opera mini, is that not good enough?

and it can be really useful too.

only thing i've found that it can't handle is java. Obviously, as i'ts running on slow, crappy, incapable of running a full version of java hardware.

'...fanboys can go around saying, quite correctly, "Well, it's not the *real* web, is it?"'

This sounds like you haven't even *seen*, let alone *used* Opera Mini!

Perhaps you could elaborate on exactly how a page - displayed identically to that viewed on a regular PC - fails to deliver the 'real' web? I accept that Opera Mini needs a lot of zooming and scrolling to view some pages: but that is limitation of the screen sizes of handheld devices. It *is* the real web!

Android comes with a web browser, based on WebKit — the open source HTML renderer that Apple forked from KHTML. And the Opera guys really think people are going to dump that in favour of a Java ME app running through a Java SE translation layer, on top of the Java SE to Dalvik translation layer?

Opera Mini is not competing with mSafari on iPhone. There's a BILLION phones that won't run mSafari and whose owners will not all switch to an iPhone, so the comparison is moot.

Opera Mini (with portrait/landscape mode view) is perfect for those phones that have 200 mhz chip on a 2" screen...if you need to read a few news sites and others, it's fine.

As decent Android hardware is released with bigger displays, it will be even better; with Opera Mobile v9.5 SDK taking the next step when these dumbphones get smarter, faster.

android hardware doesn't exist? 'scuse me, but I've been happily running android on my zaurus for well over a month, and ok, so you can't buy a zaurus from your local dixons, there's half a dozen reputable places you can buy them (trisoft, conics, dynamism to name just the three best known). You can even dual boot a zaurus to have the boring stability of the old sharp (and its derivative Cacko) distro alongside the bleeding edge of Android.

Opera mini works on very "simple" handsets and it is fast.

I suppose. however, that Android will be less "simple" and support real browsers also delivered bye Opera.

I think Bill did not look hard enough for the fat lady.

I can hear her sing in the ladies room.