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Opera Mini Mobile Browser Officially Released

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Tue Jan 24, 2006 06:08 PM
from the fingers-in-a-few-more-pies dept.
Software Handhelds Hardware
worb writes "The tiny mobile browser Opera Mini was officially released worldwide today. Opera is known for its PC and mobile browsers, but even the cell phone version Opera require more memory than most phones today are capable of. Opera Mini works by passing pages through Opera's servers to strip them down before they are displayed on the phone. Also, the Register has a story on how this actually means that Opera now offers a reason not to buy a smartphone, a market Opera currently has a strong foothold in."
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  • Opera Mini: Screenshots and discussion (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24 2006, @06:10PM (#14552759)
    Screenshots here:
    http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=13423 [osnews.com]
    Interesting discussion here about how good Opera Mini really is or it is not:
    http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/1008770.htm l [russellbeattie.com]

  • Amazing browser technology these days (Score:5, Funny)

    by digitaldc (879047) on Tuesday January 24 2006, @06:16PM (#14552803)
    Opera Mini works by passing pages through Opera's servers to strip them down before they are displayed on the phone.

    So does this mean that we can finally see pictures of Jessica Simpson and Seven of Nine naked?
  • So when can I get opera for my Pocket PC? Or any other decent browser for that matter.

    • Re:Opera for Pocket PC (Score:5, Informative)

      by Reapman (740286) on Tuesday January 24 2006, @06:32PM (#14552910)
      By downloading the Opera for Windows Mobile Pocket PC edition http://opera.com/products/mobile/products/winmobil eppc/ [opera.com]

      Note this is not the same as the mobile browser listed in the article... that one uses Java and will run on almost anything that uses Java. This one is actually an application written for the Pocket PC. I used the one that this slashdot article is talking about on my Palm Treo 600 (not for long tho, found it slow and too basic) For my new Axim x51v I use the Pocket PC version.

      As for is this a reason to not buy a smartphone? Uhhhh No.
    • Works on my N-Gage QD.
    • You can always ditch the pocketPC and get one of these [nokia.com] ;)

      I'm writing this from the device using opera 8
      • I believe those versions only work on Pocket PC smartphones, not normal old Pocket PC devices. My Asus 716 still deperately needs a good replacement for crash-happy and feature-poor PIE.
      • This is great! And for those of you wondering if it will work on the non-mobile versions of Pocket PC, it appears to on my Axim X30 running PPC 2003. This is so much faste than the PIE. There are certainly still things to fix. I can't copy or paste in the bookmark manager, and the open in new window doesn't seem to be working yet. I'll keep an eye on this one though!

        Thanks again.

  • Not as such.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Art Popp (29075) * on Tuesday January 24 2006, @06:23PM (#14552863)
    "...today offers a reason not to buy a smart phone."

    Um, no. This is, in fact, the best reason to buy a smart phone yet. Non-smartphones typically save money by having little ram, little flash memory, and slow processors, this makes them cheap and great on batteries. Even with on-the-fly-proxy-html-rewriting surfing the modern broad-band oriented Internet can be a painful experience.

    I have a SideKick II (which has Danger's very good html/image compressing proxies behind it), a Nokia 6682 (good Edge GSM phone), and a Treo 650. All of which can download a typical webpage before a SonyEricson T610 can run the most trivial of Java apps. Each of the phones has features I like, but when I need a data device I reach unhesitatingly for the Treo. 320x320 pixels and 300 Mhz beats both proxy-compression and Edge for overall web use for no other reason than more pixels and a more processor make the navigating the received page so much faster. It's also worth noting that now that T-Mobile has rolled out it's Edge network, multi-timeslot downloads are working with the Treo, so in well-covered areas it's twice as fast (~44kbits/s) as a typical GPRS download rate (~22kbits/s). In addition, the Treo has enough processor to play highframe rate videos (TCPMP), makes good use of 2gb SD cards, and has a good OpenSource SSH client (tuSSH).

    In short, if you really want to surf from your phone, spend the extra bucks and get a smartphone, or 1000 minutes of use from now you'll wish you had.
    • T-Mobile claims that you can get over 56kbps on T-Mobile GPRS on an ordinary Motorola phone when you call them. I can see that 1 timeslot is supposed to give 21.4kbps, though... Those lying bastards :(

  • Opera RSS feeds (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rapidweather (567364) on Tuesday January 24 2006, @06:25PM (#14552876) Homepage
    I wonder if Opera Mini will also have the ability to handle RSS feeds something like the regular Opera 8.51 does. I'm running it now on my knoppix remaster, and I have several RSS feeds, (including slashdot), and I think it's cool how the little feed download popup in the lower right hand corner of the screen works. Every so often it pops up and shows the download of more stories from the various feeds. Even on dialup, it loads from scratch in less than a minute, sometimes over 180 stories! Then maintains the feed lists with the updates. On a mobile device, do you suppose Opera Mini will have some sort of sound to notify of updated feed lists? Also, the way Opera handles the feeds is superior to Firefox, which only shows the titles of the stories in the bookmarks toolbar folder, in the drop down box. Opera gives you the summary of the story when you click on it, sometimes several lines long, enough for you to decide whether or not you want to click on the main link provided, and go to the actual web page for that item. Opera provides a quick and bandwidth-conserving way of scanning a lot of news items and articles very quickly. Opera Mini might be able to do this also for the mobile devices.

    • Re:Opera RSS feeds (Score:5, Informative)

      by masklinn (823351) <<slashdot.org> <at> <masklinn.net>> on Tuesday January 24 2006, @06:50PM (#14553023)

      I'm testing it right now and it doesn't seem to have any feed integration.

      Then again, the Advanced version i'm using is only 100kb, and it's stunningly fast, good looking and readable (even with the fonts set to minimum size) so I really doubt they could include an RSS reader to boot.

      Just use bloglines or that kind of stuff and put your RSS on the web

  • Opera Mini works by passing pages through Opera's servers to strip them down before they are displayed on the phone.

    Uh, I thought that was how AvantGo worked, too. Not flamebait, just asking why this is considered amazing.

    • Re:AvantGo? (Score:5, Informative)

      by drinkypoo (153816) <martin.espinoza@gmail.com> on Tuesday January 24 2006, @07:50PM (#14553351) Homepage Journal

      Opera Mini works by passing pages through Opera's servers to strip them down before they are displayed on the phone.

      Uh, I thought that was how AvantGo worked, too. Not flamebait, just asking why this is considered amazing.

      Because AvantGo provides you some downloaded content that you can browse on your device at your leisure, and Opera Mini is a web browser, with which you can dynamically view content?

      At least, that's all AvantGo did last time I used it (for Palm) and AFAICT from a super-quick glance over their website, it's all they do now.

    • It's very different. It's not yet another "we gzip HTML" service. In this setup entire pages are actually rendered on server (including Javascript, CSS) and reformatted using Opera's Small Screen Rendering (try it out: Shift+f11 in desktop Opera). Phone just receives visible result using special thin protocol (so it's more like optimized VNC client than a browser).

  • ...it lets me get FP anytime, anywhere. In fact, I'm posting this with it right now...

  • OLD NEWS!!! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24 2006, @06:42PM (#14552980)
    I've been using this for a whole week..(it was given to sprint users for Vision Phones from a link they provided on 1/13)

    http://www.sprintusers.com/forum/showthread.php?t= 87456&highlight=opera+mini [sprintusers.com]

    O-Mini seems to pass all comm through thier servers in real time. It slices most full window pages into 30 slices. It does the same on large, wider-then-tall images.

    Actually I love it so far.. I just hope they keep it free...

    Also check out Google Maps for mobile:
    http://www.google.com/glm/index.html [google.com]

    And Orb (stream MUCHO from home computer):
    http://www.orb.com/what_is_orb/ [orb.com]

    • Re:OLD NEWS!!! (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Same person as above..

      Also wanted to add...

      RSS support is missing... but it WILL bookmark, grab/store .ico files for sites, it has a history, and two a few smart ideas for making it easier on the bandwidth needed to download a site. These are the ability to switch between bigger text, to make the page webpage "slices" smaller & smaller text to be able to see more, and to pick the encoding of images from a pretty lossy jpg compression to a decent one.

      I know it does the oprea webservers are doing it real

  • BREW version? (Score:3, Informative)

    by fupeg (653970) on Tuesday January 24 2006, @06:44PM (#14552991)
    Opera Mini, just like Google Local for Mobile [google.com], is a J2ME app. Hopefully they'll both have a BREW [qualcomm.com] version soon.

  • An idea for Opera users... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lumbercartel.ca (944801) on Tuesday January 24 2006, @06:49PM (#14553016) Homepage
    By default Opera identifies itself as "Internet Explorer" and some webmasters incorrectly use this information to determine which web browsers are more commonly used.

    If you're a big fan of Opera, like we are (and it's already standard at some of the companies we regularly deal with too), you can actually cast an implied vote by setting the default to "Opera" in the settings:

    1. "Tools" menu
    2. "Preferences" item
    3. "Advanced" tab
    4. "Network" option (on the left-hand side)
    5. "Browser identification" pull-down menu

    And if you find a web site that lectures you on which web browser they think you should use, then send a friendly message to the sales department (don't bother the webmaster because given their attitude they'll probably just ignore you and not bother to let the sales people know) telling them that you were interested in their product but since you can use Opera to browse their web site that you'll just have to find the needed information somewhere else.

    • If you're a big fan of Opera, like we are (and it's already standard at some of the companies we regularly deal with too), you can actually cast an implied vote by setting the default to "Opera" in the settings:

      1. "Tools" menu
      2. "Preferences" item
      3. "Advanced" tab
      4. "Network" option (on the left-hand side)
      5. "Browser identification" pull-down menu

      That, or you know the software, hit F12 for the quickprefs and select "Identify as Opera".

      This is completely irrelevant here though, since that's "Maxi" opera and the s

    • By default Opera identifies itself as "Internet Explorer" and some webmasters incorrectly use this information to determine which web browsers are more commonly used.

      That claim is about as false as saying that the web stats are wrong because by default Internet Explorer identifies itself as Mozilla.

      Here is an example of a User-Agent string that Opera sends when it "identifies itself as Internet Explorer":

      Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Mac_PowerPC Mac OS X; en) Opera 8.51

      Notice that even tho

  • Bring out yer flamebait mods..... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Darth_brooks (180756) <chico.wccnet@org> on Tuesday January 24 2006, @07:00PM (#14553079) Homepage
    So, does this mean that if Opera desperatly needs some more cache, they'll start logging the pages they strip and sell off the logs to the highest bidder? What about DOJ requests for folks checking out pr0n on their mobile phone?

    Is this liability that Opera really wants to take on?

    • Re:Bring out yer flamebait mods..... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by flurdy (301431) on Tuesday January 24 2006, @07:22PM (#14553199) Homepage
      If they obey the laws of Norway, being a Norwegian company, and/or if their proxy servers are hosted in Norway, then they are not allowed to keep any personal information and definetly not allowed to sell them on. Pretty sure police/court requests don't change that situation either.

      What they do with anonymous data is not clear though.

      However I doubt they use central servers, probably got some deal with google or us/global networks....
    • Remember Opera is based in Scandinavia. DOJ has no direct leverage on them. Also, in Scandinavia, privacy laws are taken seriously and must be obeyed by governments as well as corporations.

    • So, does this mean that if Opera desperatly needs some more cache, they'll start logging the pages they strip and sell off the logs to the highest bidder?

      No, if they need more cache, they'll probably move from pentium to xeon. Or maybe intel to AMD...

  • Dedicated Opera Mini User (Score:4, Informative)

    by thpdg (519053) on Tuesday January 24 2006, @08:25PM (#14553561) Journal
    I have been using Opera Mini on my Nokia 6230 for about a month now. It runs very quickly, much better than the built in browser on my particular phone. I have found only rare pages that don't work properly. I use HTML gmail, without a problem, and many other full sites work great. You can still look at the mobile versions of sites, and they work even more quickly than the mobile versions in the built-in browser. Supports cookies and SSL without a problem. It's great when you want to go to a site without argument of what your phone can and can not do.
    It has a nice front page that helps you quickly return to sites you looked at in the last session, your top bookmarks, and jsut sites you'd like to see on the front page. It also has a very complete options menu, for the standard browser options.
    Only one problem: it doesn't support the required technologies to properly support AJAX. It's becoming more and more necessary, and it's a shame that you can't use the dynamic gmail and dynamic custom Google front page. I'm sure they'll get it worked out soon. I'm not sure if it's the javascript, the XML, or the HTTPRequest object, but it just doesn't work. It may even be a DHTML issue.

    Conclusion: Try this browser if you have a java phone, you'll love it.
      • I've always suspected that.
        I see on the Opera mini webpage, they are pushing their own AJAX like system. I wonder if pages are tagged correctly, if they start to work. Their example is the flickr webpage.
  • Just an intersting note from Mobile Tracker http://www.mobiletracker.net/archives/2005/11/10/l g-vx9800-review [mobiletracker.net] ...Opera Mobile requires between 3 and 4 MBs of RAM. This device does not set aside that much RAM for the browser. And if it had more RAM, I am sure the included browser would run better anyway.

    As for Opera Mini, its abilities are WORSE than the version of the Openwave browser included in this phone: version 6.2.3.2. Opera Mini is a very scaled-down mini-browser (even centering text doesn't work) w
    • Thank you (NOT) for quoting MY comment WITHOUT any attribution and taking it OUT of context to confuse the Slashdot readers.

      That comparison was between Opera MOBILE/Netfront and OPWV, *NOT* Opera Mini. They are NOT the same thing. Opera Mini is a completely different codebase than Opera Mobile's.
    • OK, try browsing the REAL mobile web with Openwave, then use Opera Mini.

      Openwave doesn't support much of the formatting at all. It doesn't support large pages at all. It barfs on complex pages.

      Also, note that Opera fixed the centering thing in this release of Opera Mini ;)
  • I cannot get very far in the download with my WAP browser on my blackberry 7510 before it says download failed. On a side note, I have been trying to download and install 1.2 for a few days now, but I keep getting a java out of memory error on installation. I guess they did not QA for all platforms.

    Mirror:
    http://www.getjar.com/products/3334/OperaMini [getjar.com]
    or from your phone:
    wap.getjar.com

  • Finished Installing... (Score:3, Informative)

    by fishthegeek (943099) on Tuesday January 24 2006, @11:07PM (#14554399) Journal
    I just finished installing Opera Mini on my Tungsten E2, and this is an amazingly fast browser. I've been using Blazer and there is just no comparison in performance.

    The interface is minimalist and not entirely intuitive for a long time Palm user and at best it could be said to be a little errr... unpolished, but it is serviceable.

    You can compare the performance between Opera and Google because they both offer WAP proxying and you can expect Opera's performance to be somewhat faster. Over all it's a sound app, and it works swimmingly on a humble E2 (despite the fact that they claim it isn't supported) so if you have a Lifedrive or Tx the performance should be outstanding.
  • At least they showed the good sense not to call it Operetta.
    Making gadgets do more and more things is neato and all, but I can't get excited about surfing the web or watching videos on a 1-1/2 inch screen. It would be like riding a motorcycle with 4-inch tires -- good for about 5 minutes of novelty, then give me back my Harley.

    /like I have a Harley
  • I've been using it this morning and it's much better than my phone's built in browser. They seemed to have actually taken usablity into account. (I didn't realize that a phone app could be this nice.)
    • What are you talking about? I have the Motorola Linux feature-phone E680i running Opera 7 (Motorola's linux smartphones are not true smartphones because the SDK is not given away to developers to write native apps for the phone -- a crucial part of a smartphone platform), and I have also installed Opera Mini 1.2 just fine. It works fine.
    • I guess it's using the standard network abstraction layer from your phone's J2ME, so it'll download at what the phone gives him e.g. I'm pretty sure it'll download at EDGE speed when available.

    • Actually I'd suggest you to just try Opera Mini out (it's free after all), the lowest font size on my phone (nokia 6230i) is surprisingly crisp and clear, and puts a LOT of data on the screen. It's actually genuinely nice and easy to read.

      The bigger font is, of course, much more readable, but it breaks lines far more often and I find it actually lowers the readability of the pages for me.

    • O2 are quite useless when it comes to stuff like that. I expect that you need to be on WAP over GPRS instead of over GSM. You might have the wrong settings in your phone.

      For the Nokia phone I used to have, I couldn't get the correct settings from O2 for their own servers! I had to go to the Nokia website and have it text the details to me. Ludicrous.

      But fear not, I have exactly the same phone as you, I use O2, and it works fine for me. Give customer support a call and ask them to text you the connection det
      • These are taken from my Nokia 6670 (in turn copied from my old 7650), you'll have to work out where to enter them on your phone. This access point works for me with Netfront, Opera Mini, Opera 6 and 8(.0/.5) and the piss poor Nokia browser. I've transferred these details to a Sony Ericson K750i(?), and Opera Mini worked there too. I've never been charged for GPRS use in the ~3 years I've been with O2.

        The only problem I have had is that I couldn't get my three mounth subscription to Operas compressing proxy
    • This is just what I always wanted: A poorly written browser nobody uses on a platform nobody finds comfortable!

          Now, come on. We've had Internet Explorer for years now.

          PS: I've just tried Opera Mini on an old POS Nokia phone and it worked flawlessly. I'm floored; kudos to the Opera crew!
    • Actually, I'm using it on a RAZR with T-Mobile, and it works great. I did, however, have to set up my RAZR to use HTTP via GPRS. You can use http://tmobileus.wdsglobal.com/phonefirst [wdsglobal.com] to send a set of valid GPRS settings to your phone, and then, if you have access to it, modify it to allow for HTTP. Doing so may require you flash your phone's firmware, however. http://motomodders.net/ [motomodders.net] can help with that. If you have a RAZR and you're willing to play around with flashing it, I can give you more exact ins
    • By default Opera identifies itself as "Internet Explorer" and some webmasters incorrectly use this information to determine which web browsers are more commonly used.

      How the hell do you accidentally post a comment twice? Or was it because the original was so thoroughly debunked?

      If you're a big fan of Opera, like we are (and it's already standard at some of the companies we regularly deal with too)

      Dude, if you're not astroturfing you really need to work on your writing style. It sounds like you're writing ad

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