Archive for October, 2009

Ever since the days of my old Sony Ericsson K550i, then K750i & now Nokia N79, Opera mini has been the de-facto browser of my choice. Most of the time, this was due to the fact that the web browser on Sony Ericsson phones was useless & only JAVA based applications were supported, so Opera Mini was a obvious choice.

Although now I use a Nokia N79 which has a good Webkit based browser which does provides desktop like browsing, it is still slower then Opera mini in terms of shear speed & data usage when using on a pay-per-kb model of most Indian GPRS plans.

I have used Opera mini since version 2 & have always liked its rendering speed & font rendering. For a mobile phone’s screen, the fonts are amazingly good. At the server side, Opera is using there own Presto rendering engine with Opera Mini 5, means the page is first rendered on the server of Opera with there latest browser engine then the page’s snapshot is compressed & sent over the air to your phone & what you see on your phone is an optimized version of the same page. You can either see the web page in desktop edition or a more optimized edition for mobile phone’s screen, due to Opera’s Small screen rendering technology first seen in Opera 7 for desktop. Opera indeed has been the pioneer in the field of browser innovation by giving features like tabbed browsing, speed dial, Opera Turbo & Small screen rendering, but they are behind in desktop browser usage.

I do hate Opera for all the “IE 8 is evil” fiasco but for browsing on a mobile phone, even I agree that the current version of IE is bad compared to Opera Mini/Mobile. Opera just rocks when it comes to embedded & device specific browsers. Opera is about to release Opera Mini 5 whose beta version is available for testing. There is only much which you can do with a browser on a mobile phone, but opera just upped it by giving features which are also in there Desktop browser.

With Opera Mini 5, Opera made the UI a lot more user friendly on touch screen mobile phones. Since 90% of the manufacturers are releasing new mobile phones in mostly touch screen form factor, the old Menu based layout of Opera mini 4.2 is not suitable. Opera has revamped the UI completely, yet making sure it adapts according to whether you are using a Touch Screen phone or a Keypad phone.

Below is the screenshot in which the UI is shown on a conventional phone on the left & a touch screen phone on the right with multiple tabs open. Navigation gets sometime used to, but once you get the habit, its quite easy to use. Since the future of mobile phones is touch screen phones only, whether you like it or not, its time to get used to the UI & UX of big buttons instead of Menus.

To make browsing even better on such a small package, Opera mini 5 also brings Inline text editing which lets the user edit the text in the same field instead of opening a new window for entering text. But here is the thing. This inline editing is for those using a qwerty keypad based phone like Nokia E65 or HTC Touch Pro 2, but the old method of a new window for text editing is also there for those of us using conventional phones like Nokia N79 which can use T9 to type.

However, Opera Link, ability to use a custom search engine & the RSS reader are not there in Opera Mini 5 yet, but it is scheduled to be released with the final version. RSS Is the primary task for which I use Opera Mini in my phone so exclusion of RSS is highly unlikely as that is also a feature many users use, cos on a mobile phone.. I have yet to see a better RSS reader then this.

One thing which we conventional phone users with keypad have over the touch screen users, is that our application can have shortcut keys which touch screen cannot. But then again, they have touch screen input which works better for browsing websites in my experience. Opera Mini 5 is actually making me use shortcut keys more & more for all tasks like #+5 for opening the bookmark menu, *+number to open that particular speed dial bookmark etc. It actually fast. There is a thread on Opera forum regarding tips for using the new version

The settings menu is also changed & made finger friendly.

The best part, Opera Mini 5 now has password manager & inline text selection, which come handy. Since this version has tabbed browsing, long pressing on a link gives you the option to open it in a new tab. Be warned that the current performance with multiple tabs is slow, so even I don’t open more then 3 tabs on my Nokia N79. I hope with the final version, the performance is further increased.

Opera indeed has a much better product in the mobile browser space then the competition. Even iPhone is no where near, cos Opera Mini is still faster then iPhone & now the UI actually  beats iPhone’s Safari UI hands down.

Opera should rather use there resources on making the desktop browser better then suing Microsoft for IE 8 inclusion in Windows & open the browser for 3rd party extensions like Firefox or Google Chrome, if they want to succeed. They have been very very innovating in the browser space but the only reason many people don’t use it is due to lack of 3rd party application & extension integration. Its good that Opera software gives an EMail client, Torrent downloader etc in there browser itself in a very efficiently programmed software, but the general user today knows that he can extend the capability of his Firefox or Google Chrome or Internet Explorer 8 browser using extension but not in Opera, is what stops many of us users from switching full time to Opera.

You can download beta version of Opera Mini 5 by going to http://m.opera.com/next using your phone’s inbuilt browser. This is the recommended way as you also get to chose signed version which remove the continues nagging when using an unsigned JAVA application on a mobile phone due to security reasons.

* Images curtosy of wapreviews.com & intomobile.com