The flip phone web: browsing with the original Opera Mini

Opera Mini was first released in 2005 as a web browser for mobile phones, with the ability to load full websites by sending most of the work to an external server. It was a massive hit, but it started to fade out of relevance once smartphones entered mainstream use. Opera Mini still exists today as a web browser for iPhone and Android—it's now just a tweaked version of the regular Opera mobile browser, and you shouldn't use Opera browsers. However, the original Java ME-based version is still functional, and you can even use it on modern computers. How Opera Mini works In the 1990s and 2000s, most mobile phones didn't have the processing power to load full desktop websites. Instead, an alternative Wireless Application Protocol (WAP, but not that WAP) was created for simple websites that could work over a 1G/2G connection on a typical mobile phone. For example, the BBC had a regular website for users on desktop computers, and a simpler WAP site for users on mobile phones and PDAs. The ... Read full article.