Opera have announced SoonR, which seems to be a toolkit for doing AJAXy stuff on mobile phones (via the Opera browser, of course).

From their demos, it looks to me that AJAX on mobile is more about prettying up the interface and incremental UI improvements than it is about bringing anything revolutionary about... highlighted menu selection was kinda nice, the sliding slideshow seemed like a bit of fluff, but their Skype chat with auto refresh (which I note is "coming soon") was the only thing that grabbed me as being really neat.

Of course, the interesting thing about AJAX on the web is that it doesn't only work with a single browser; until mobile AJAX is similarly stable across many devices (which could be a lot further away thanks to the fragmentation in browser standards on phones) then it doesn't really hold the same value. To me it's a Flash competitor right now, scrapping it out with Macromedia at the edges of the mobile development ecosystem whilst WAP, XHTML and Java continue to dominate the mass market.

.mobi and Ajax : They don't mix ...: "First, it is assumed that there is a clear divide between mobile sites and non-mobile sites; there isn’t. I have a mobile web browser on my PDA"

BONG! Sorry Ajit, you're disqualified :)

As a PDA owner, you're a freak. Don't worry about it - you're in the same box as most of the folks working in mobile right now (myself included), in that you care about the devices more than the public do. PDA owners are a tiny slice of the overall market - if you're launching a consumer-facing service, they're not usually economical to bother with. And their needs, expectations and capabilities are completely different from those of the mass market.

".mobi, by contrast, foresees islands where these domains do not mix; at least, they don’t mix a the level of the URI. That’s just not where AJAX and mobile web services are going. What’s more, the mobile web apps that are most likely to be successful and make money are precisely the ones that successfully achieve this data convergence."

I don't see why

http://www.tomhume.mobi/blog/post/1234M
http://www.tomhume.org/blog/post/1234

Shouldn't both work, providing the sort of URI-application-state thing that Ajit is talking about and satisfying the .mobi requirements...

Game about game design: "Tune is a game that teaches game design. Find the perfect combination of jump strength, rotation, or gravity to accomplish each goal. Get under the hood and understand what goes into tuning game mechanics. Experience the satisfaction of tuning a mechanic perfectly. How well can you tune Tune?"

The greatest trick: "In many ways, the recording industry is the biggest dupe in the DRM wars. They have repeatedly been sold, and have repeatedly bought heavily into copy-prevention schemes that don’t work, can’t work, and only give more power to the DRM vendor."

Project risk reduction patterns by Alistair Cockburn: "The top risks are those that will keep you from delivering the system you need. Unless they are addressed, the rest of your work does not matter. The top risks do not arrive in waterfall sequence; they arrive in any sequence, popping up at any time. You will know a project based on risk management, because it will become increasingly clear over time that the system will ship successfully."