Christmas is all about sharing, and so some kind Fido and/or Rogers employee has thoughtfully made public an internal presentation of the forthcoming Canadian GSM handsets in 2009.

The thread is here on the Howard Forums — since it could be taken down at any moment I grabbed the most pertinent pics to share with you!

Great news for Rogers customers, the N79 and N85 are coming sometime in the first half of 2009. Not for Fido, though. Boo…

Fido will at least get to share Nokia’s first touch-screen device, the 5800 XpressMusic. I might use my Fido Dollars to snag myself one of these…

And the ubiquitous BlackBerry will finally be available on Fido — and thus every wireless carrier in Canada. Dunno about that UNO service, though…

Feel free to spread these pics far and wide… Here’s wishing all Canadian GSM subscribers a fancy new handset in 2009!

Here’s some love for Canadian mobile users, all the way from Norway!

Jon S. von Tetzchner, CEO of Opera Software (that’s him to the left) recently posted his company’s State of the Mobile Web for 2008. The report contains stats for specific countries, and because Canada is included I thought it worthy of re-posting here.

Thanks to the intrepid team at IntoMobile.com for bringing this to my attention…

Snapshot: Canada

• Page-view growth since January 2008: 187.4%
• Facebook is popular among Opera Mini users in Canada. (well, duh…)
• Opera Mini users in Canada prefer Google, with Live in a distant second place, and Yahoo completely absent from the top ten list.

Top sites ranked by unique users

1. google.com
2. facebook.com
3. cnn.com (no CBC.ca? For shame…)
4. wikipedia.org
5. gamejump.com
6. youtube.com
7. my.opera.com
8. live.com
9. hotmail.com
10. nytimes.com (why not TheStar.com instead?)

Top handsets for November 2008

1. BlackBerry 8330
2. BlackBerry 8130
3. BlackBerry 9000 (AKA the BB Bold, which has Opera Mini installed by default)
4. BlackBerry 8310
5. Nokia N95
6. BlackBerry 8320
7. Nokia E71 (w00t w00t!)
8. Sony Ericsson K850i
9. Nokia 6275i
10. Sony Ericsson W810i

Even though I myself have moved on from Canada’s smartphone success story it’s not surprising that RIM devices occupy no less than half of the top ten handsets browsing the mobile web in this country. As for the rest of the world I was especially heartened to read this:

Experts predicted this year as the year when the mobile Web would become mainstream. Our numbers from previous reports on Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia have confirmed that indeed the mobile phone has come into its own as a platform for the Web.

If you don’t have Opera Mini already installed on your handset click here to read my glowing review, then hurry up and download it already — unless you have an iPhone, in which case I can’t help you…

Far be it from me to tell RIM their business — I bought some of their stock back when it was trading below $75 CAD and haven’t looked back — but their latest handset, the Pearl Flip 8220 announced this week at CTIA, is a bit of a head-scratcher…

Don’t get me wrong here, I think this is a far more attractive handset than the original candybar Pearl, and had I trialled this little number instead of my fugly 8700 I might have stuck it out with RIM just a little longer. I think a clamshell BlackBerry is a stroke of genius and I expect it will sell like gangbusters in North America and would humble even the mighty iPhone in Japan.

If you didn’t already know this the Japanese mobile market is clamshell-crazy — by my entirely unscientific calculations flip phones outsell all other form factors by about a bajillion to one. The folks at RIM have even included a loop on their first flip for a keitai charm, pointed out in the graphic above.

But there’s one bewildering problem: The Pearl Flip doesn’t do 3G.

The BB Bold, which is already available in Canada (suck it, rest of the world!) has tri-band 3G, so I would have expected subsequent models to follow suit. Instead, our Japanese friends are falling over themselves to witness a DoCoMo variant same fugly 8700 that I threw to the ground in disgust before abandoning it.

I suppose the SureType keypad might also not translate so well for Japanese character input, but in all other respects I bet Japan would flip over this latest RIM job.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go turn myself in to the pun police…

The lowly Java app is the bane of the S60 user’s existence — I mean, what’s the point of having a modern, multitasking mobile operating system if some dinky little program is going to ignore your UI and suck up all your available memory while it runs?

Well, in the case of Opera Mini the hassle is entirely worth it.

I’ve been hearing about Opera Mini since my days with the CrackBerry — folks over at the HowardForums had recommended it as the web counterpart to RIM’s mobile-optimized email, offering up the ability to surf full-sized websites while saving precious kilobytes on Fido’s less-than-generous BlackBerry Connect plans. This same technology is also available for followers of the WinMo, Treo and just about any other mobile handset on the market — except the iPhone, that is… Haw-haw!

What makes this Opera sing (sorry) is the heavy-lifting going on backstage, otherwise known as server-side optimization. It goes something like this:

1. You fire up Opera Mini on your mobile and send out a request for a web page.
2. The page goes through Opera’s servers; on the way back to you the graphics get compressed (based on your own settings) and the stuff your mobile can’t read gets stripped out.
3. You see a thumbnail of the original page and a cursor to zoom in on various parts of the page. It won’t impress your friends quite like pinching and spreading your fingers on an iPhone or iPod touch, but it works just the same if not better.

This is all fine and well, but what sold yours truly on Opera Mini was a demo I saw this past week on BBC World’s Click!, wherein the synchronizing of mobile bookmarks was accomplished by dragging an dropping tabs from an Opera desktop browser — on a Mac, no less!

The interface is called “Speed Dial”. You can see for yourself what it looks like on a full-sized computer by clicking on the thumbnail to the right, and/or have a look at Opera’s own Flash demo.

The other half of the equation is Opera Link. Note that to get this all working you need beta 9.5 of the desktop browser, Opera Mini 4 and an Opera Link account, all of which are 100% free.

So here’s what Speed Dial looks like on my E61i:

The “Bookmarks” link leads to my vast directory of mobile portals and whatnot that I’ve been collecting since my first smartphone. These nine shortcuts are more easily accessed via the pop-up menu seen below:

You may notice that my Speed Dial links are all mobile-friendly web pages to begin with. Let’s just say I’m really stingy with data.

It took me an evening and the following morning to get everything up and running, and I’ve yet to try out the software on other platforms, but so far Opera Mini has proven itself worthy of a coveted spot on my Nokia’s standby screen:

You’ll notice that Nokia’s own web and WAP browsers are nowhere in sight! Kudos to you Opera Mini, for making the Wee World Web a better place…

I may have given up on Podcasting myself, but that doesn’t mean I can contribute to the Podcasts I listen to, right?

The kind folks at All About Symbian have featured an audio comment I submitted to them in their latest AAS Insight — if you absolutely need to skip ahead to my part you can scrub through the embedded audio on the page to about the 18:20 mark.

I myself just heard it this very morning in the gym, and especially enjoyed making Steve Litchfield squirm in defence of his Smartphones Show not playing natively on my E61i. Not to worry Steve — from now on I’ll catch the YouTube version with the free S60 player you talked about earlier in the Insight…