Opera Software and Freedom Media today announced the world's first mobile widget application based on Opera Software's mobile AJAX authoring environment, Opera Platform. Named "Freedom", the application offers a collection of mobile pay-per-view services.

"Freedom is a great demonstration of how the Opera Platform mobile AJAX authoring environment can help operators, handset manufacturers or content providers create compelling user-oriented premium services that are not hindered by the limitations of WAP and GSM/GPRS data transfer speeds," says Timo Bruns, EVP Mobile, Opera Software. "AJAX has become very popular on the Mac/PC platform, and it makes even more sense in the mobile space as it enables the creation of Web based services that are so fast they seem like local applications."

Opera Platform allows developers to create platform independent applications based on well known Web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Together with XMLHttpRequest, the combination of these technologies is popularly referred to as AJAX.

At this stage, Freedom will be pre-installed on selected Nokia phones in the Norwegian market, and it will also be available as a free download for Norwegian Nokia S60 mobile owners.