Opera Mini 5 | Ed Hewitt

23Apr/102

My Thoughts on Opera Mini 5

Web browsing on your mobile has never been very good, its either a poor expensive service or a terrible browser to access the web. For the past few years, web browsers on mobile phones have been proprietary browsers created by the manufactures which displays text and low res images.

Every since the introduction of the iPhone, we have seen how mobile browsers should work. Safari Mobile has lead the way in browsing the web on your phone. Showing us how its possible to browse the full web on your phone, instead of WAP designed webpages. Manufactures followed suit to create web browsers to rival's Apple's creation. The only company to come close was Google's Android platform, but the browser on their mobile OS is not as quick or feature filled as Safari Mobile. Everyone expect Mozilla or Microsoft to challenge Apple, but they have been far too slow to the market. Mozilla only finally getting their browser out a few months, but only currently on the Nokia N900, and Microsoft's browser will be part of Windows Mobile 7, which will be out at the end of 2010. In the end it was Opera which have produced a browser to challenge Apple.

Many believed that the browser would be designed to run on iPhone, which a few weeks ago now does. Instead, it will run on any Java phone! Quite a challenge to pull off, to bring the full web to a standard mobile phone as well as smart phones. Smartphones such as Nokia, Blackberry and Android phones have Opera Mobile, which offers the same feature set as Opera Mini, but not as impressive.

This review is all about Opera Mini, and how 'blown over' I am with what Opera have achieved. Its great to have a web browser which provides the full internet you get on your computer, on your phone. With support of all the current web standards,

Opera Mini 5, the best mobile web browser

such as HTML5, CSS and Javascript. Opera have also managed to incorporate some of their browser features on the computer onto the phone. With tab support and speed dial, which puts 9 of your favourite websites on one page for easy access. A common issue with mobile browser, is that they are slow and format poorly. Opera has always stride to create a quick browser, and they have. They even compress the pages, with little loss of visual quality to improve speed and save you money. CNET and many other sites have shown that Opera Mini is quicker than Safari Mobile on the iPhone 3GS. Formatting is almost perfect, and large web pages are easy to navigate with the ability to zoom and easily move around the page.

Opera Mini is an excellent achievement, it looks and works great on phones. In my opinion the best mobile browser out at the moment, even beating Safari Mobile. Its a slick browser, which any iPhone, SmartPhone and Java mobile user must try, and get a good Internet plan to get full use out of Opera Mini.