Changes of Opera Mini 5.0 beta Java ME web browser
What is the most used software on your mobile phone? Different person will give different answer. My personal answer to this question is Opera Mini, a web browser based on Java ME. That is why I downloaded and installed the new Opera Mini 5.0 beta on my Nokia N82 as soon as I found it available.
Many Apple fans claims that Safari on iPhone is the best mobile web browser today. They could be correct. But for more mobile phone users, no matter how excellent Safari is, it is useless to them. The biggest advantage of Opera Mini is that it provides pretty good surfing experience on a very wide range of mobile phone modes.
Though the default web browser of N82 is also more or less OK, because I am used to Opera Mini since my old Motorola E680i, it remains my favorite mobile web browser. And I don’t believe that server based web browsers like Opera Mini will fade out in near future, as there will still be a very big users group of non-smart Java-enabled mobile phones.
For detailed review of Opera Mini 5.0 beta, there is a very good post by Dennis Bournique. I just make a personal summary about Changes of Opera Mini 5.0 beta here.
1. Opera Mini 5.0 beta is more targeted to touchscreen mobile phones such Nokia N97, 5800 ( Symbian S60 V5) or Samsung non-smart phones with Flash UI, the UI of Opera Mini 5.0 beta is quite different on touchscreen or non-touchscreen mobile phones. And it has higher requirement for mobile phones’ hardware than previous Opera Mini version.
2. Opera Mini 5.0 beta has a pretty new redesigned UI that bring some better user experience but also take users of previous Opera Mini versions like myself more time to get used to it. For example, the shortcut of history changes from #5 to #6. BTW, when users choose a web page from history it will be reloaded in Opera Mini 5.0 beta instead of being loaded from cache in Opera Mini 4.2.
3. Tab browsing of Opera Mini 5.0 beta is a very significant improvement. But users need to do some research to find out how it works. For example, press “1″ or hold center key to invoke context menu including “Open in New Tab” and “Select Text”.
4. Copy and past text is another useful new feature but it only works inside Opera Mini 5.0 beta. To copy to system clipboard, third party input tools may help.
5. By default, text input is inline mode, which means T9 or other predictive input doesn’t work. To change that, users have to disable “setting” -> “advanced” -> “inline editing”.
6. Some useful features available in Opera Mini 4.2 like direct download is missing. And pages saved by Opera Mini 5.0 beta have a different format, which is not compatible with Opera Mini 4.2 though they have the same file extension.
Anyhow, as it is still a beta version, we can expect the formal version of Opera Mini 5.0 will be better.
[...] like Opera Mini very much but there are limitations of it. The latest Opera Mini 5 has a lot of enhancement. However, it is too slow even on my N82 since Opera Mini is developed with [...]