Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Review: Opera Mini 4.2 beta
So I'm in bed last night, ready to conk out, and as normal, doing some last-minute scans of my blogroll on my BlackBerry 8830 when I came across the announcement that Opera had released a beta of its new mobile browser, Opera Mini 4.2. I've been running 4.1 for several months now, somewhat begrudgingly, being forced to deal with multiple daily system crashes that require a hard reboot (removing/reinstalling the battery) in exchange for faster browsing and and overall better user experience than with RIM's stock web browser.
And I gotta tell you...4.2 is MUCH better. Opera Mini's been touting faster mobile page surfing for awhile now, largely because of the proxy framework the company established that makes page accesses snappier. Under the Settings option, you can choose between HTTP and socket access, the latter being notably faster. And now even better news, especially for those of us in my neck of the woods:
Opera Mini 4.2 can use our newly established server park in the US. This means significantly faster page downloads for our users in the Americas and Asia-Pacific region. Users in the rest of the world will also experience faster page downloads since we've reduced the load on our other servers.
This was very welcome news to me, due to the aforementioned crashes. I've noticed that such tend to happen when the browser is set in socket mode and the user might do too much too quickly (i.e., rapidly changing pages before they're completely loaded, stopping page loading in transit, loading extremely large chunks of content).
So instead of calling it a night, I surfed like a madman for the next 45 minutes, putting the new app's proverbial feet to the fire, and being pleasantly surprised at what I found. My first impressions are very favorable: No crashes. Multiple skins. MUCH faster browsing, which is great for wireless providers using EDGE networks...this bad boy would scream under 3G scenarios. And the app itself runs very lean, not making my device crawl to a snail's pace.
And the one feature I've always enjoyed about Opera Mini that I believe puts it over the top - the built-in RSS reader - remains a winner. It handles single-click subscription and manages multiple feeds wonderfully.
Some of the cool features that would work on other mobile OSes, like viewing pages in landscape mode, don't work on the BB. And I've never been crazy about the way Opera Mini handles HTML textbox controls, forcing the loading of a new screen into which data is inputted, confirmed, and then returned to the web page with the modified element. I've always preferred the BlackBerry's Browser app, having more of a native web page feel. I may ben the minority, but to me this is always an inconvinience.
So grab a copy and give it a spin. The upgrade is available for BlackBerry, the Palm OS, and as a standard Java MIDlet.
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