I've been looking around a bit for a future replacement for my aging Nokia N95. One thing that definitely has to work on the new phone is OperaMini as I am often in situation an places without fast and affordable 3G Internet access. I've noticed that OperaMini is available for the Android platform so I gave it a try on one of the new Android devices.
The Good Stuff
The Mini implementation on Android is great! Pages are loaded in a flash and the touch interface works very well for following links or selecting a page to go to from the bookmarks. The browser also doesn't have to stand back when directly compared with the native Android browser. The kinetic scrolling is not as smooth as with the native browser but on the other hand, pages are loaded much faster due to the network side compression. Also, unlike with the native browser, I can go back several pages very quickly as those pages are still in the cache and thus do not trigger a reload. Another important point: Copying/pasting of links works in the same (clunky) way as on the N95 by bookmarking a page, selecting and copying the URL in the process, aborting the task and using the URL for example in the e-mail application. Not very elegant, but it works.
The "Not So Good" Stuff
The one thing I didn't like: Either Android is not fully multitasking or the amount of RAM was not sufficient as whenever I went to the home screen and started another application OperaMini was closed and I had to start from scratch again when going back. The program loads very quickly but the previous pages were no longer in the cache. That's a pity as it works much better on my current N95, where the browser stays in memory no matter how many other applications are open at the same time.
Check this out, interesting bit about their “implementation”:
http://labs.opera.com/news/2008/04/10/
Opera is simply not usable. The text inputs use the whole screen, there is no “OK” button for the google search for example, and the return key puts a new line instead of submitting the input.
How can that be?
OK, I had to press menu and then “OK”
Not really useable, but since it’s actually fast it is worth a try 🙂
Hi,
Agreed, the number of key presses could surely still be improved but even now I find it quite usable!
Cheers,
Martin
Hi Daniel,
very interesting link, so Opera Mini runs on Android in a Java ME to Java SE emulation wrapper that was modified a bit for the Android runtime environment. Very cool!
Thanks for the comment!
Martin