joey said:
>   Bird: You appear to ignoring the approximately
>   700 million devices which, since sometime in 2005,
>   have been able to run the Opera Mini browser,
>   which is a full-scale browser like Firefox, IE,
>   Chrome, Safari, or its own big brother, Opera.

gawd, it's like talking to a wall.


>   I have personally been using Opera Mini
>   on a myriad of devices for almost 4 years now

you and who else?  oh yeah, those 700 million "devices".

but, for some strange unknown mysterious reasons,
99.9% of the people who check their weblogs find that
opera (in all its forms) registers under 1% of their visits.

and that's my point, here, people, that's my whole point.

very few smart-phone users were using their smart-phones
to visit the web.  so even if it was "possible", in some sense
of the word, no matter how sharply constrained, the fact is
that very few people actually made use of that "possibility".

and the fact that a few of you can come here and say "i did"
doesn't change the fact that very few people out there in the
real world were using their smart-phones to access the web.

not until the iphone came along.

even now, years after apple _revolutionized_ the way that
smart-phones accessed the web, the small percentage of
people who own iphones access the web disproportionately,
clocking in at about twice the usage, if i remember correctly.


>   Maybe next time, you can actually hire a professional to
>   do your research for you, as you so clearly
>   dropped the ball here.

maybe next time you can actually hire a professional to
come here and try to put stupid words in my mouth,
because you clearly are incapable of performing the task.


>   Admittedly, the small screens makes using websites on these
>   a decidedly sub-optimal experience, but that's only marginally
>   less true of the iPhone or iPod touch that you seem so very fond of.

and evidently -- based on the actual facts of real-word usage --
the "marginally" better iphone screen makes a world of difference.
or maybe it's the touchscreen.  or the radically-transformed interface.
or maybe it's z _combination_ of all of these factors, and even more.

and, just to keep the record straight, i'm not "so very fond of" the
iphone.  the screen is still too small for me, for the most part...

but my _personal_ feelings are not of any real importance here...

what's important is the revolution that advanced the state of the art
to the point where tens of millions of people were suddenly accessing
the world wide web from their phones.  that made all the difference...

if microsoft would've done that, i would be cheering for microsoft...
if h.p. would've done it, i'd be cheering for them, and talking about
how _they_ made a difference by putting the web in our pocket...

so, do you "get it"?  it's _not_ who put the capability in place first,
putting the first cell-phone-user online.  it's who _developed_ it,
to the point _tens_of_millions_ of cell-phone-users went online.

-bowerbird