Opera Mini Mobile Browser Officially Released

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."

Opera Mini: Screenshots and discussion

[Anonymous Coward]

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]

AvantGo?

[Orrin Bloquy]

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:Opera for Pocket PC

[Reapman]

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.

OLD NEWS!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

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]

BREW version?

[fupeg]

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.

Re:Opera RSS feeds

[masklinn]

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

Re:OLD NEWS!!!

[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 time as I made up a page on my home apache and it sliced and diced it.... much like a Ginsu(tm) knife... but for like webpages.

Re:GRPS vs EDGE?

[masklinn]

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.

Re:Opera Mini: Screenshots and discussion

[Anonymous Coward]

These guys do it:
http://mobits.com/ [mobits.com]
Check their portofolio too.

Re:AvantGo?

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:Opera mini servers slashdotted?

[FromWithin]

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 details for GPRS.

Also be aware that O2's GPRS seems to just go off for hours at a time, so you might be experiencing an outage.

Dedicated Opera Mini User

[thpdg]

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.

Finished Installing...

[fishthegeek]

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.