A few days ago Opera released Opera Mini 5 beta for public testing. Opera Mini is the most popular mobile phone browser and differs from other browsers in the way it delivers content to you. All your web traffic will pass through Opera"s servers (much like the Turbo feature in the desktop versions) which compresses the data to save data cost and make pages load faster on your phone. This enables you to view full websites in Opera Mini instead of having to visit special mobile versions.
New features in Opera Mini 5 beta include:
- A completely new look and feel
- Tabbed browsing
- Better touchscreen and keypad support
- Password Manager
- Speed dial
A downside of their server-based protocol is that a lot of AJAX-based sites (like x.facebook.com) do not work properly, since javascript is only supported in a very limited way. It is slightly disappointing the rendering engine didn"t get an update, and some annoying glitches from previous versions still exist. It is still a beta though and many things could change before the final release.
Still, Opera Mini is one of the few applications that is able to provide a very good application experience on a mobile Java platform, and is in most cases a lot better and faster than built-in browsers in most phones.
Feel free to download it to your phone and try it out! Opera Mini 5 beta can be installed side-by-side with older versions.