Opera Mini 4 Beta now available
Published by Rafe Blandford at 9:59 UTC, June 19th 2007
The beta of Opera Mini 4 is now available from the Opera website. The new version renders a full page overview from which you can then zoom in to read the page (very reminiscent of S60's browser overview / minimap mode). Other new features include the introduction of a mouse and power scrolling making it easier to move around pages and a quick access context menu. Read on for more and screenshots.
The beta seems reasonable stable, although as a Java application it does use a fair amount of RAM on Symbian devices. The rendering is good, although not quite perfect in places. However it is very impressive to see this sort of application created in Java and given it can run on a great many devices should prove popular.
Web pages are not rendered in exactly the same way you would see them on a PC. Instead text is rendered in to columns which are are the width of your phone's screen. This minimises the amount of scrolling needed when reading text.
As before Opera compresses the pages and images on the server side before it sends them to the phone. This means pages load more quickly and less data is consumed than traditional browsers. The side effect of this is that is much more practical to browse full web pages rather than mobile version. A good example of this is the BBC News website, Opera says it takes around 40kb in Opera Mini versus 240kb in other mobile browsers. Opera tested against the S60 web browser running on an N93 on a UMTS (3G) network and found that Opera Mini 4 was on average twice as fast. My own tests suggest there is a significant difference, but it might not be as large as Opera suggest and of course there are other factors to take into consideration.
The previous version of Opera Mini used a fit to screen model (effectively squashing a website into one thin column). This works quite well on a mobile device and although the full page view is now the default you can switch to fit to screen in settings or via the new context menu (as shown above).
The new mouse and power scrolling features make moving around the enlarged pages (compared to the previous version) much easier. It is among the fast navigation experience around a page that I've seen on any mobile browser.
Opera Mini 4 is not yet fully featured, notably some of the security features found in version 3 are not present. Opera says it will adding these and additional features later.
You can see more information on Opera Mini 4 here. We'll have a full review once it is out of Beta.
Categories: Software
Platforms: Series 60, Series 80, Series 90, UIQ, General, N-Gage, S60 3rd Edition, UIQ 3
News Discussion
I assume the article is teseted on a high end Nokia phone. Quite impressive is the conclusion. If you happen to have a high volume phone (like a Nokia S40 phone) like most of the world, I dare say Opera Mini 4 is a major breaktroguh in mobile browsing. It is better than the current Nokia S60 browser in my eyes, but will run on any odd phone and it faster, cheeper to use and free. What more can one ask for?
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Originally Posted by Joar
The bookmarks and cookies etc. are stored on the Opera servers - you can thus not back them up. But it seems version 4 is not installed on top of version 3, so any bookmarkes from v. 3 is not deleted.
I assume the article is teseted on a high end Nokia phone. Quite impressive is the conclusion. If you happen to have a high volume phone (like a Nokia S40 phone) like most of the world, I dare say Opera Mini 4 is a major breaktroguh in mobile browsing. It is better than the current Nokia S60 browser in my eyes, but will run on any odd phone and it faster, cheeper to use and free. What more can one ask for? |
I'm a huge Opera mini fan yet one thing still bothers me.
Where the h*** do they get their money from? It's got to be an evil conspiracy to take over the world somehow. Has anyone got a better explanation for such an awesome free product?
Anyhow, great work Opera, has usual...its nice to see another European company kicking serious ass :)
I actually think the S60 Web Browser and Opera Mini are both worthy of being installed.
S60 Web Browser is more powerful and has slightly better rendering (I think it'll even up though) and has better features as some of the other commenters have mentioned... Its a fuller experience, that said for many Opera Mini might be all they need (especially on non flat rate data tariffs).
Its a J2ME app so it will always be slower than the native S60 3rd Ed (new) browser. Also once addicted to the S60 browser its hard for anyone to use operamini. At times I've even used the S60 browser for internet banking, which I dont think I will ever do with operamini (actually dont know if its even possible or not in opera mini ,all that ssl/https stuff)
Its a gr8 app for other phones I mean S40 , and other brand phones.
For example many non-smart phones on T-Mobile use a T-Mob branded version of Opera Mini as the access point for Web N Walk.
Another example is Onspeed who take Opera Mini, give it a horrible green skin and sell it as Onspeed Mobile. (Onspeed sells Internet accelerator software).
By the way has anyone found how install this on an N95? The combined S60 browser doesn't let me get to Opera's WAP based download page, it keeps taking me to the HTML marketing page instead (presumably because it registers as Safari).
That said, wow... is there any more reason for the white elephant Nokia browser?
Opera Mini 4 - haven't been able to crash it yet!
Winner: Opera Mini 4!!
http://mini.opera.com/global/opera-m...vanced-int.jar
or download that to PC and use PC Suite
If only they could put in a right click save as feature(obviously you would need to assign a key to right click)... also they or someone could add an ifetcher type app to download every file on a page...I have 2 gigs on my k790a so lets fill er up.
It's still better than what came with the phone. But I want more.
Cad602