Sprint is upgrading its cellphones to the Openwave platform for Web browsing.
Openwave is a combination of the Openwave proxy server that makes pages more mobile-friendly, and the OpenWeb browser, which is a full-HTML browser that renders pages nicely.
The big picture is it gives Sprint phones the ability to browse the whole Web in a useful way, not just WAP or mobile-themed sites. Other browsers, notably Opera Mini, use a similar approach, but this is interesting because Sprint’s pushing this across its entire line of devices.
Sprint Customers to Get a PC-Like Experience of the Open Internet on Their Phones [Press Release]
Sprint omit to mention that their proxy completely ruins any web sites that already work perfectly on a mobile phone…
I suppose “killing anyone apart from Sprint’s ability to host ringtones, wallpapers, Java games or anything else that requires device recognition” is probably Sprint’s intent – http://techype.blogspot.com/2008/03/wait-are-they-talking-about-same-thing.html
I’m so glad I’m not a Sprint customer.