The power of Opera Mini

[peaz]

Here's something I've posted on my blog and thought I should share here as well. It's A mobile review of Opera Mini - @Peaz and it's REALLY cool to use.

So for those who can afford an unlimited data package from your cell provided, do get it!

Technically, being able to post anything at all from my humble Sony Erricson W810i is quite a feat already. And now writing a review of Opera Mini 4 Beta with, well, Opera Mini itself of course is truly amazing!

And I'm even writing this entry now with some html paragraph tags too! That's actually quite a bit of work. And a full keyboard would definitely help here, a lot. But back to the review, I can easily summarise it to two words. Opera Mini ROCKS! Ooops, that's really three words. It's really just a simple JAVA-based browser that works with most modern day mobile phones. What makes it really special is it's ability to re-render the requested page so that it suits the view of a mobile phone. And the new still beta version 4 takes it to the next level by even allowing me to set the page to render full with a cool and easy way to zoom out and move around the full page. Although, I somehow still prefer how Opera Mini version 3 renders on my W810i phone. Yes, version 4 beta preserves more elements of the website as you'd see on a regular PC. But on the puny screen of a mobile phone, somehow Opera Mini version 3 does the job better.

Note: At this point, I'm continuing this on my PC desktop. I've actually almost done writing this post when my phone crashed as it didn't seem to handle editing over 2000 characters well. Grrr...

Anyways, continuing with the review, one other cool feature that Opera Mini on version 4 beta has is the ability to render the page layout in landscape mode. This really helps with the readability of web pages on the small screen of my W810i phone. Not stopping there, it also allows you to choose the size of the font which it would use to render on the page. What amazes me here is how well the smallest font is rendered and how readable it is.

Another cool feature that Opera Mini has is that when there is a file input, it replaces it with a 'sort-of-button' that allows you to instantly use your phone's camera to take a photo and then uses it as the file to submit. I found this feature out when I wanted to test if I'm able to upload a photo that's already in my phone to my Serendipity-based blog. Unfortunately, the feature didn't work and gave me an error instead. And on version 4 beta, this feature was not available for me to select at all. I might revisit this feature again using another site to test. I think that it does work with the photo blog site on Opera's website though. This would have been a real killer application. But I'd probably like it better if it was able to allow me to choose to select an existing file to upload or to use the camera to take a new photo. But I think this would depend on the phone models as different manufacturer would probably implement different file systems on their phones.

All in all, Opera Mini has allowed me to do some really cool stuff. One of which is of course to post a blog entry anytime and anywhere now. I've also been able to access and control my torrent downloads at home anywhere and anytime now. I'm able to do this since I use Torrentflux as the Web GUI for my torrent client running on my Ubuntu-based notebook. But I'm sure Opera Mini works well with the likes of uTorrent's Web GUI as well. If you're worrying about AJAX and window pop-ups, fret not at all. Opera Mini handles AJAX and window pop-ups really well. Of course there will be situations where it won't be able to handle as a PC can. But heck, if I'm able to access and log in to Tech ARP's Google Analytics account and check up on all those AJAX-enabled graphs, I'm a happy camper already.

If there's anything there to complain, it's not really on Opera Mini, but rather how my Sony Ericsson W810i phone performs when using Opera Mini. For one, the capability where it knows how to capitalize the first character after an apostrophe somehow vanishes. This makes it cumbersome for me as I'd need to press the * button to toggle between caps and non-caps characters. Worse of all is that it only allows me to input up to 2475 characters. And even worst is that it crashed on me when I had about 47 characters left to type! I suppose my next phone would be either a Symbian-based Nokia or a Windows Mobile-based Dopod. Hmmm.

All in all, Opera Mini rocks. You really need to go download it onto your phone and test it for yourself to understand how cool it is. Otherwise, here's how you can test the browser via a simulator running the actual JAVA application.