Today I have been mostly playing with Opera’s latest public beta of their mini web browser.
I’ve been a fan of the Opera Mini browser for quite a few years. I installed version 4 on my Nokia N95 and found it a great improvement on Nokia’s early attempts at writing their own browser.
So when I got my N97 it didn’t take much for me to install Opera mini 4.2 on that too. In fact it was the Nokia browsers terrible habit of eating all the main storage which made me do it… Aparantly this is fixed in firmware V12, but being a UK resident with an unbranded UK phone, and the V12 firmware only having been release a month ago, I have not been deemed worthy of having an update.
Opera Mini V4.2 worked fine on the N97. It had some strange quirks, mainly associated with it not being designed for a touch screen device, but overall it was very good.
Opera Mini V5 beta *has* been designed with touch screen in mind, and boy is it good. This beta is more stable and finished than some of the software supplied on the N97 by Nokia… The buggy/restricted Facebook application for example.
Opera Mini V5 mini supports tabs, has an onscreen keyboard for text input, can render pages reduced to fit the screen or zoomed. Pages can be dragged about with your finger. It really is very good.
It does have a couple of quirks, the main one I notice is then using the N97 in landscape (keyboard deployed), it still shows the onscreen touch keyboard when you have a field to type in (which obscures the bottom half of the page). You can use the N97’s real keyboard, but for some reason the SYM button is disabled, which prevents access to certain characters, like underline which I use in a lot of my user names. This is still accessible by the virtual touch keyboard, so it’s not a show stopper. I did try to do a screen grab, but unfortunately my screen grab app didn’t seem to realise what landscape mode was and made rather a mess of it!
So what are you still doing here?
Go and get it (for the N97 use the java version).
If you are using your phone right now, go here
If you are on your PC, go here
