As the Internet becomes more and more important to the way we live our lives access to it on the move becomes more and more important. We now have mobile phone networks capable of delivering the Internet to the tiny screens in the palms of our hands (for a price of course) which is awesome in concept, but in practice often kinda shitty.
Enter Opera Mini.
The problem in most cases with frustrating mobile Internet experiences tends to be the software rather than mobile Internet simply being shit, Opera Mini for me, highlights this because when you use Opera Mini to browse the Internet on a mobile device things get distinctly less shitty.
Right now I have a Samsung Tocco Lite which is a touch screen phone, not a smart phone as most touch screen devices tend to be, just a regular phone with a touch screen, but I got to know opera Mini on an older Sony Ericsson model with a standard keypad. Opera attempted to bring a lot of desktop features to the mobile browser that most of them tended to lack while maintaining an outlook that focused on mobile usability. Opera mini allowed the user to choose whether they wanted to see the full version of the web page and zoom in to the bits they wanted to see closer or if they wanted everything slimmed down into a single column they could scroll down - and the best thing about it was that it was fast and smooth and in several ways. In full page mode everything was enormously fluid, the kind of fluid ads for the iPhone make it appear to be (although in reality is not), using the number keys you can quickly glide along the page and zoom in and out with precision - great! but not only that but browsing with Opera Mini routes your pages through Opera compression servers thus delivering you the full sized Internet at a fraction of the size and at speeds comparable to a desktop - marvellous!
Opera Mini made other tasks easy too, the "start page" was a haven of usability - you could directly enter a web address, perform a search with a variety of engines (you could even create custom searches from any search box on the Internet!) or access a "speed dial" a list of your 9 favourite links. All good stuff.
Now you may have noticed that I've been talking in the past tense, that's because everything I've said up until now regarded Opera Mini 4.2 and previous, today Opera released Opera Mini 5 beta.
It's shiny and new, it adds some exciting new features while disappointingly axing others. The best thing for me as a touch screen user is that they've optimised the new version for touch screen control - a massive plus, 4.2 had some touch support, I could scroll by swiping, click links and such, but when entering addresses manually, rather than bring up the phones full virtual keyboard as it did when entering text anywhere else, I was forced to use the gimped virtual keypad the Tocco Lite seems to append to the bottom half inch of any java app not made by google. Also, no concession was made in the phones menu system for touch screen users, button sizes that were perfectly fine for pure keypad input became frustratingly tiny for fingers and the wrong thing was often pressed. OM5 redresses all that. now everything you need to touch is good and chunky - almost everything. In their bid to support touch screen users more fully they've developed their own onscreen qwerty keyboard that pops up when you need to input text. Although I like having a proper interface for inputting addresses now the virtual keyboard Opera have created is vastly inferior to the phones native virtual keyboard in almost every way. In fact the only improvement made by the Opera team is in the aesthetics - and that's not even important. The main issue is the lag between my touch and the character appearing on screen, I can tap out all the characters in a word before the 2nd letter has actually appeared on screen - this wouldn't be a particularly big issue if the keys were big enough that I could be assured the correct character actually registered without visual confirmation - but they're not. Operas keyboard also lacks the biggest strength of the Samsung one, the tactile feedback of vibration when a key is struck - this appears to be an issue in any application not native to the phone, which is rather disappointing.
The OM5 can be set to portrait or landscape view - the onscreen keyboard is really tiny in portrait view, but a decent size in landscape. Despite the full touch screen support the Tocco Lite still appends it's crappy virtual keypad to the bottom of the screen (right of the screen in landscape) - I've emailed Samsung to see if there's anything I can do about that - remain hopeful.
Next up on the positives - tabbed browsing comes to Mobile! That's right ladies and gents, no more shall you be limited to browsing a single web page at one time! Everyone knows the concept by now, it's not quite the same as on desktop, instead of having the tabs displayed along the top of the browser you press a button on the toolbar that pops up the tab bar allowing you to open and close at your leisure. This is a feature I've often found myself pining for and now it's here, happy days indeed!
It's been rather apparent of late that Opera have been trying to shake off the perception of their products as "ugly", they started by revamping the style of their desktop browser with Opera 10 (which is rather sexy I must say) and they've continued with OM5 which has developed a textured black look which is rather nice.
Slightly less good is the overall performance of OM5 in comparison to its predecessors, it's definitely slower at navigating around the program - less snappy moving between options and scrolling pages is noticeably less smooth, although the loading speed of pages appears as good as ever. Hopefully this can be put down to the beta status of the release and they'll boost the performance by the final.
There are a few other notable omissions and differences that detract from the new release, setting a speed dial for example is no longer as simple. Formerly one could bookmark a page and at the same time choose to set it as a speed dial, no longer, furthermore your choices for setting a speed dial are limited to entering addresses manually or selecting from recently visited pages - although the pages that make this list appear to be random. The custom search feature has also disappeared, although the developers suggest it will return.
So Opera Mini 5 is one to watch, given that this release is a beta there's plenty to be optimistic about for the final release, so hopefully those performance issues will be improved.
edit: And it has a password manager which is pretty sweet too.
freedoms_stain, always online, out.
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