TAG | Opera Mobile 9.5 beta due July 15 at last! |
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| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Friday, 27 June 2008 | |
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Page 1 of 3 Zoom in, zoom out, see desktop pages as they were intended on a smaller mobile screen, use Web 2.0 sites with ease, access Safari ready sites or desktop versions, it’s the opposite of mobile browsers such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser for Windows Mobile devices, and far better than the generally rather useless browsers that exist on other mobile phones. There are, of course, some exceptions. One is the browser found on Nokia devices like the N95 and other N-Series devices, which has been really great at showing the desktop version of web pages and letting you see it all by scrolling around while automatically formatting the text to fit on smaller browser screens – a much better system than trying to force everything, graphics and all, to appear in one 2-inch column. It's also a massive step up from previous phone browsers to come free with the phone. But Opera Software created the Opera Mini browser to compete, a free Java based browser for mobile devices that displays the web page in full, letting you easily zoom in and out to text and images. It's even better than the free browser than comes with Nokia N-Series devices, but also works with a stack of other smartphones for which no other browser has been available, like Samsung or Sony Ericsson devices and dramatically improves the small screen browsing experience. Opera Mini even sends everything through a proxy to let you receive images in lower resolution to cut down on data being transferred – vital in a world where mobile data charges on some phone plans are still monstrously expensive. And for those with big data plans for their phones, a high-res option is available so images arrive in a higher resolution. Opera also created the paid “Opera Mobile” browser, with version 8.65 being the latest one. Its Windows Mobile version was like Opera Mini on steroids, bringing “tabbed browsing” and superior page layout to the WM platform, and actually making web browsing on WM phones far more pleasurable than with mobile IE. But when the iPhone’s version of Safari arrived, it changed people’s perceptions once more of what a mobile browser could look like and achieve. Now, whether Opera was already working on something similar with Opera Mobile 9.5 or not, iPhone Safari would have given the programmers at Opera Software some interesting ideas, and for the past several months they’ve been working on taking Opera Mobile to the next level. Although it won’t be free, it won’t be expensive either and looks like it’ll be worth every penny –and much cheaper than buying an iPhone, especially if you already have a Symbian or Windows Mobile powered phone you’re otherwise quite happy with. A YouTube video from February this year demonstrates a beta version of Opera Mobile 9.5 beta at work. But what are some of the other features Opera Mobile 9.5 promises, such as the ability to play YouTube videos right in the browser window on your phone? Continued on page 2. |
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