Opera Software today announced its first AJAX powered widget for mobile phones. The app’s called Freedom and gives users a suite of widgets such as news, real-time stock prices and maps.

“Freedom is a great demonstration of how the Opera Platformโ„ข 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.”

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.