Opera Software and Freedom Media have announced the world's first mobile widget application based on Opera Software's mobile AJAX authoring environment, Opera Platform. Named “Freedom”, the application offers a collection of mobile pay-per-view services designed to increase the usability of mobile Web based services by offering a suite of widgets such as news, real-time stock prices and maps, all through a rich user interface.

“Freedom is a great demonstration of how the Opera Platform mobile AJAX authoring environment can help operators, handset manufacturers or content providers create compelling user-oriented premium services that are not hindered by the limitations of WAP and GSM/GPRS data transfer speeds,” says Timo Bruns, EVP Mobile, Opera Software. “AJAX has become very popular on the Mac/PC platform, and it makes even more sense in the mobile space as it enables the creation of Web based services that are so fast they seem like local applications.”

The Opera Platform Software Development Kit (SDK) sparked the interest of mobile content providers, mobile analysts and Web developers worldwide when the beta version was released on November 15, 2005. Opera Platform allows developers to create platform independent applications based on well known Web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Together with XMLHttpRequest, the combination of these technologies is popularly referred to as AJAX. AJAX is a Web development technique that is increasingly used to develop new Internet services such as Google Maps and Amazon A9 Search. Opera Platform enables these types of rich Web applications to be developed and used on mobile phones. In addition, Developers can easily adapt existing content and Web applications to run on mobile phones using Opera Platform.

“Using Opera Platform was the natural choice for us when developing the Freedom application” says Frank Rigal, CEO, Freedom Media. “With the Opera Platform Software Development Kit (SDK) we could quickly create a platform-independent mobile widget solution using open-standard Web technologies instead of native code for the different mobile platforms."

At this stage, Freedom will be pre-installed on selected Nokia phones in the Norwegian market, and it will also be available as a free download for Norwegian Nokia S60 mobile owners.