eBay and Opera software have announced a joint pilot project to bring eBay’s Online Marketplace to mobile phones in Germany. The customized version of the Opera Mini mobile Web browser will enable people to bid, sell and buy using their mobile phones.

The fully customized Opera Mini eBay edition offers direct, mobile access to eBay's content and functions through an eBay search field and bookmarks displayed on the browser's start page. An integrated eBay menu page lets users browse, bid, buy and sell using their mobile phones.

eBay Germany has 20 million customers, making it the largest eBay community outside of the USA. "With this pilot project, our users will get a new eBay browsing experience on their mobile phones," says Bjorn Behrendt, Senior Manager Platform Solutions, eBay Germany. "We are excited to provide our users with full access to all of eBay's auctions on their mobile phones."

Using Opera's unique Small-Screen Rendering (SSR) technology, Opera Mini reformats regular Web pages to fit the width of mobile screens. This enables Web sites and content providers to reach mobile users with their existing Web sites, without having to invest heavily in mobile specific solutions. This allows for instant access to the mobile mass market.

"The Web is rapidly expanding from the PC realm to mobile phones, and our partnership with eBay is an example of how a Web based service can reach the mobile mass market with their existing solutions through Opera Mini," says Rolf Assev, CCO, Opera Software.

It must however be noted that the Opera team is yet to come up with fixes for some problems pertaining to the page download size. "When I browse to the Opera page to change the skin, the page allowing you to select a skin only loads 1KB and then gives me the 'Problem reading from server' error," said an Opera Mini user. "I hope this is almost fixed now, but I think there still may be a few problems. We're still looking into it, so no official statement from Opera yet," said an administrator on the Opera Forums. Opera is known to come up with quick fixes to problems, so this one, if not already fixed, will perhaps be resolved just in time for the football world cup in Germany.

The Opera Mini eBay edition is available as a free WAP download by directing the phone's WAP browser to their website or by sending an SMS with OPERA to 88881.