Taking Opera Mini for a Spin

I was away from Crashpod headquarters this weekend, and being that I simply can’t go more than a day without my dose of tech, I took this opportunity to test out Opera Software’s solution for mobile browsing: Opera Mini.

Opera Mini is a purely java based application, which means that it can run on a wide variety of mobile phones and PDAs. Indeed, installing and launching the app on my Sony-Ericsson S710a was relatively painless, and I was quite pleased with result. My main browsing destination was the grass-roots news destination Newsvine, which was actually extremely useable in this mobile browser.

One of the key features of Opera Mini is that it doesn’t try to be more than it is: images and layout styles are mostly ignored, the application instead favoring the use of limited bandwidth to pull down pure text content. This is one of the best examples of a real world need for the concept of a “skip to content” link I’ve come across. Surprisingly enough, Newsvine doesn’t feature a means to advance directly to the main content for a given page, which means that the user must scroll through navigation and extraneous header links every time a page is loaded.

Opera Mini compensates for this dilemma though, giving the user both the means to advance the page line by line, as well as “page down” multiple lines at a time. In order to prevent confusion, the screen will visably scroll when the user pages down, which helps the user to keep track of where they were reading, since they’re looking at a page full of text.

Of course all browsers need bookmarks and a history, and opera mini fulfills this need admirably. Bookmarks and the history both employ a site’s favicons, enabling the user to quickly glance at icons to find their desired destination.

Load times are generally very tolerable, a large status bar on the bottom of the screen showing users how much data is left to be transfered before they’ll have access to the loading page. This feels a lot like Apple’s Safari, which forgoes the IE-esque “loading icon” in favor of a large download-like status bar. This is a big difference between Opera Mini and your generic wap browser that’s thrown in at the last minute by a phone’s manufacturer: often homebrewed browsers will force the user to guess whether the application is actually loading content, or whether it’s frozen due to one of the many bugs from which it suffers. These proprietary manufacturer browsers generally have the rushed feeling of executives simply wanting the luxury of being able to print “internet enabled” on their product’s packaging. Opera Mini however, feels like it’s been built by programmers that really get what makes a browser great, and that’s an extremely refreshing quality.

If you ever have a need to access the web on the go, I see no reason why Opera Mini shouldn’t be your first choice for a browser: it’s fast, very useable, and totally free.

Try it out today!