Can you browser do that? Not unless it’s Opera

I loves me some college football.

The only problem is that there are far too many games to watch on any given Saturday, even if they were all televised (which they aren’t).

What’s a guy to do?

Well, if the guy uses Opera, he can use http://wap.espn.com.

But he can’t use IE. Or Firefox. Or Safari. Or Camino. Or OmniWeb.

Just Opera.

Why? Well, for years Opera has been developing mobile-friendly technology. Their mobile version of their browser is a huge success.

The desktop version of Opera also has the same capabilities, which includes the ability to view WAP pages, so instead of this:

(Firefox’s view of the page)

You get this:

(Opera’s view of the page)

That’s just a snippet of the page. They also have stats, etc.

ESPN also has a similar feature on their main page, but it’s loaded with ads, graphics, etc. (In my experience it also lags more behind realtime than the wap version, but that’s not an exhaustive test.)

Using this feature of Opera lets me follow several different games at once. I can open different windows with different games and see them all at the same time.

ESPN also has an auto-refresh setting which will update the page every 30 seconds. But for some games that’s more than I need. For some games I only want to update every few minutes, so I can control that by right clicking on the page and selecting “Reload Every” and then selecting from the option menu shown above to have it refresh every 1/2/5/15/30 minutes #. Track the games you want, as often as you want.

I’ve seen statistics that something like 80% of Internet users are on high speed. Given that sports fans are driving sales of High Definition televisions, I suspect that a lot of sports fans probably have broadband. Me? I would if I could (broadband, not HD, which I still consider to be overpriced) but I can’t get it here.

Still it’s just another nice “little feature” Opera offers, made especially nice by the fact that no one else offers.

There aren’t a whole lot of WAP sites out there (that I know of) but ESPN and wap.switchboard.com are the only ones that I use regularly. Both of them give me exactly what I want: fast information without heavy ads and graphics.

I have a bunch of WAP and other mobile-friendly sites bookmarked at http://wap.tntluoma.com/ if you are curious to check out more of them.

Footnote:

1. Opera’s refresh menu also will let you choose to refresh every 5/15/30 seconds but that’s fairly silly in this situation because ESPN’s system isn’t designed to update that fast. If you want a 30 second update, use the one ESPN offers. Using 5 or 15 seconds is just a waste and sends extra hits to ESPN’s servers for no reason, so don’t do that. ↩