ported

Opera Mini ported to Windows Phone but limitations abound

Apps

By Daniel Rubino, Saturday, Dec 10, 2011 at 12:51 pm

In an interesting and unexpected twist, Opera Mini (not to be confused with Opera Mobile) has surprisingly been ported to Windows Phone and posted over at XDA. It comes from the Windows Mobile code but has an extra "layer" to interface/work on Windows Phone 7--that's the good news. The bad news is it can only run on devices with custom ROMs like DFT meaning interop and dev unlocked phones are out, for now.

The file is only 1.13MB in size and Windows Phone Hacker notes that "...the dev obfuscated his code. Thankfully, we already know how it works, which is surprisingly simple. Time to hack ;)" meaning perhaps we'll understand more about what is going on with this and what is not. What we can take from this experience is that Opera Mini could evidently be ported to Windows Phone, if Opera wanted to do so, but due to perhaps Microsoft blocking such an app in the Marketplace, not worth their effort.

We're sure we'll be seeing more on this project soon. Though we do have to wonder: compared to IE9, how good can this be?

Source: XDA; via WPSauce, Windows Phone Hacker

Nokia Drive patched to work on other Windows Phones

Apps

By Daniel Rubino, Sunday, Nov 20, 2011 at 1:00 pm

Nokia Drive, their mostly-offline navigation system for the Lumia series, has been hacked off the 800 and patched to work on other Windows Phones. We loaded it up on the HTC Titan to see if this was all legit and sure enough, it is.

Coming from a Chinese forum (which we're not linking), the XAP comes in at 7.35MB but of course grows dramatically once you choose and download maps. In fact, the maps are quite massive here for the States, where it weights in at 1.9GB and took nearly an hour to download and install. It's certainly not a bad piece of software but it's also nothing to go out of your way for either.