Opera have announced SoonR, which seems to be a toolkit for doing AJAXy stuff on mobile phones (via the Opera browser, of course).

From their demos, it looks to me that AJAX on mobile is more about prettying up the interface and incremental UI improvements than it is about bringing anything revolutionary about... highlighted menu selection was kinda nice, the sliding slideshow seemed like a bit of fluff, but their Skype chat with auto refresh (which I note is "coming soon") was the only thing that grabbed me as being really neat.

Of course, the interesting thing about AJAX on the web is that it doesn't only work with a single browser; until mobile AJAX is similarly stable across many devices (which could be a lot further away thanks to the fragmentation in browser standards on phones) then it doesn't really hold the same value. To me it's a Flash competitor right now, scrapping it out with Macromedia at the edges of the mobile development ecosystem whilst WAP, XHTML and Java continue to dominate the mass market.

Comments

[Thomas Landspurg]

Seems to me that SoonR is a different company than opera, just using their browser? May be there is a kind of cross marketing agreement between them....

[Song Huang]

Hey, thanks for taking the time to post a bit about our announcement with Opera. I wanted to comment on your posting to clarify a few things.

Up until now, mobile applications were a bit clunky. There were longs lists of options to click on and every click would cause a round trip http call to the server and a browser refresh. The result was a lot of screen updating and waiting as the application retrieved data and updated the intereface. Lot of users would deem an application unusable since they wanted a cleaner experience.

SoonR, which is a revolutionary application, gives mobile users access to remote data AND applications on PC's connected to the internet. In our latest interation we have leveraged the superior Ajax support found in Opera.

The UI bits you describe, make SoonR behave much like a resident application on the phone. This is a game changing breakthrough. The menus and animated slide presentations, etc, are made possible because data in streamed in the background while the UI is presented almost instantly. Mundane things like searching for someonecan be done LIVE as the user types. This capability was never available on any WAP application in the past.

Basically, mobile applications will be made more usable. It's a big deal. Just because you can do something like search remote desktops from a phone is cool, but making it so that people will actually use it, it cooler.

P.S. I am one of the SoonR guys. Please try out SoonR and let us know what you think.

[Thomas Landspurg]

Son, I assume that by "until now" you are talking only of Wap application, right?

However, SoonR seems interesting, but I have no way to test it outside wap...I have plenty of phones, latest generation, but no one with the right browser embeeded....Seems to me that it's a risky bet for you?