Thanks for posting your findings about Opera on the N70 — quite interesting indeed! It sounds like Opera is doing some sanity checking on startup to ensure that network connectivity is possible. I suppose it’s a reasonable thing for them to do since the odds of a customer launching the browser to surf a local webserver are generally slim-to-none. Hopefully the idea of accessing a local webserver will gain enough traction for browser developers to adjust future releases to better handle this scenario.

Now I wonder if the new open source S60 browser checks for network availability on startup as well?

Swapping the Sonofon SIM for a Portuguese Optimus SIM *with* a data plan, I don’t get prompted, and I can browse from Opera with no problem (it might be that Opera is simply using the default APN, and that’s why I’m not being prompted).