Sprint has announced a partnership with Openwave to launch OpenWeb, a platform that will improve the Web browsing experience for Sprint customers with Internet-enabled handsets. The OpenWeb solution will enable faster, more user-friendly rendering of both mobile websites and Internet sites that are not optimized for mobile devices. Sprint customers will benefit from this new enhancement automatically, without requiring any user intervention.

Openwave's OpenWeb is a content adaptation platform that intercepts requests for all standard websites and converts the webpages into a format that is compatible with the mobile phone. OpenWeb ensures that webpages will automatically appear on Sprint customers with data-enabled handsets in an easy-to-read format that mimics the desktop Internet experience, regardless of the memory or processing power of the device. OpenWeb adapts the standard layout of a website and reconstructs it to fit the screen of a particular phone, providing automatic in-page navigation so that users can access the most important data on the website faster.

"Whether clicking through the Sprint portal or typing in a URL, both new and existing customers can use their Sprint phones to search virtually any Web site and it will appear quickly and in a format they're used to seeing on their computer screens," said Kevin Packingham, vice president of wireless product management for Sprint. "By working with Openwave, we're making that Internet experience even more customer-friendly and useful by enhancing the ability to translate non-mobile sites onto the mobile phone. While other carriers are just beginning to talk about open ecosystem initiatives, Sprint is continuing its efforts to give customers an even better experience with the Internet that we have always allowed."

Sprint is the first U.S. carrier to launch Openwave's OpenWeb solution, which will become available in the coming weeks. This initiative follows Sprint's launch of a more user-friendly mobile search solution, Microsoft's Live Search, in 2007. Sprint plans to launch additional mobile Web innovations in 2008.