New Opera Mini Beta Competes With iPhone
by Dan Harrelson
The Opera web browser for mobile, named Opera Mini, released a beta version this week. The main feature being hyped is the ability to zoom into web pages just like Safari on the new iPhone. Opera even produced their own “Mac vs PC” style video knocking the iPhone.
The zoom feature helps to deal with my biggest complaint about browsing on a mobile…. there’s millions of sites that are not optimized for mobile devices. A page designed to be read on a PC just doesn’t degrade to a 2-inch screen. The zoom feature allows you to view the entire page as it would render on a larger screen and then view a smaller subset of the page when you need detail.
And if you want to get closer to an iPhone, try a replacement contact list manager.
In other mobile news, MSN redesigned their mobile site this week.
I use a Cingular 8525 and the beta was unusable at first. I searched online and found that someone hacked a new Java Virtual Machine (JVM) to work on Windows Mobile 5. After installing the new JVM, Opera Mini worked for the first time and I was able to get in and check out the new zoom feature first hand.
Note: Java on Windows Mobile is not the best. Try out the native Windows version named Opera Mobile. Why a Mini and a Mobile version? dunno…
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June 22nd, 2007 at 7:54 am
The Opera Mini version is primarily meant for non-smartphones. Opera Mobile, on the other hand, is a full mobile browser that runs on higher end phones.
Daniel
Opera Software