Opera Mini 5 BETA is the best looking Java app I’ve ever seen
I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve been neglecting Opera Mini for quite sometime. Between 3G and Wi-Fi coming to almost every phone I’ve owned in the past 3 years, advancements made to the S60 browser such as Flash support & kinetic scrolling and the fact that a lot more of my favorite websites offer mobile friendly content, I haven’t had a need for a browser that can display full HTML pages while using substantially less data than the typical native browser. I believe the last time I employed Opera Mini full-time, I was carrying around a Nokia E62. The idea of installing Opera Mini didn’t even enter my mind until I heard that the beta of v5.0 had been released, I just can’t resist a public beta so I hit up http://m.opera.com/next from my N97 to see what was new and if it was possible that Opera Mini could become my everyday browser.
Jump Page
From the moment you launch Opera Mini 5 BETA, you’re going to realize that this isn’t your daddy’s Opera Mini. In fact, this isn’t even your daddy’s Java app. The visuals have gotten a huge overhaul for this release and the old ‘Sarah, Plain & Tall’ start page has been replaced with a jump page with 9 customizable shortcuts and 2 toolbars at the top and the bottom of the page. The header toolbar is present at the top of every page you navigate to and includes an address bar and Google search bar. The Google search was a very nice touch as 80% of the time that I open my mobile browser, it’s to perform a quick search for something or another. The footer toolbar contains the navigation buttons.
Settings Menu
The most interesting thing about this toolbar is the ‘New tab’ button which bring up the dialog to open a new tab, close an open tab and as I only discovered at the time of writing this, return to the jump page by opening a new tab (I was all set to trash Opera for not providing a way to return to the homepage too y’know).
Opening a new tab
The browser handles tabbed browsing reasonably well but don’t expect it to perform miracles. If you open too many tabs at once, the browser will crash…Bank on that and more often than not, it will take your whole phone down with it. Y’know what? I don’t even know if I’d call it tabbed browser, it’s more like opening multiple windows and switching between them (because of the absence of a tab toolbar) but it is definitely a welcome feature on any mobile browser.
The browser crashed shortly after I took this screenshot
One of the new features that I found very intriguing was the inclusion of an on-screen keyboard for S60v5 devices. Typically, whenever it came to entering text in Opera Mini, selecting a text field would open a text entry screen similar to the Messaging app. When using Opera Mini 4 on an S60v5 device, tapping this text entry screen would open up the standard text entry options you would have for your device (For example, on the 5800 XM you could enter text using the fullscreen QWERTY, mini-QWERTY, T9 or handwriting interfaces). The on-screen keyboard looks and feels amazing (it is actually one of the only features of the browser that responds well to touch input. More on that shortly) and is leaps and bounds better than the native fullscreen QWERTY in a number of ways, not the least of which is that Opera understands that a QWERTY keyboard does not need to take up 85% of the screen real estate. The 4 row on-screen keyboard is equipped with any letter, number, or symbol you could possibly need while only taking up the bottom half of the screen (in landscape orientation). However, I found that there are two major flaws when using the on-screen keyboard on my N97. The first is that you can’t turn off or hide the on-screen keyboard even if you are typing on the N97’s physical keyboard. This is understandable as the N97 is the only S60v5 device with physical keys and it wouldn’t make sense for an owner of a Samsung i8910 HD to turn off the keyboard nor would it be sensible to provide N97 users with their own version of the BETA. Opera Mini 5 has no problem detecting any keystrokes from the physical QWERTY (except the Sym key curiously) but it leaves the on-screen keyboard up there to take up half of the screen space. The second problem is that if you’re typing anything in a text box that’s longer than a sentence, expect the keyboard to obscure most of it. It is impossible to scroll through the text box too so don’t bother trying.
So much for replying to this post
As I mentioned, the touch support in Opera Mini 5 is still very much a work in progress. It can take several tries tapping on a link before the browser detects it and even when it does, it usually opens the wrong link which happened to be nearby, If you’ve set the text size to Extra Small like myself, you are in for a lot of frustration. For the sake of your own sanity, remember that lipstick-shaped stylus for the N97 that we all laughed at before we threw it back in the box? Go get it and keep it handy if you plan on using this beta extensively.
I noticed something a bit strange about the way that Opera Mini 5 BETA interacts with a few websites as well. In the past, pretty much the only website that would detect Opera Mini as a mobile browser was HowardForums but now it’s hit or miss. Facebook detects it as a mobile browser, however ESPN.com does not. Not a big deal since Opera Mini still compresses everything before it hits your device, just weird and worth noting.
It’s really about time you visited my blog 
The last feature I want to highlight is one that I know a lot of users have been pining for but I could really care less about – the ability to copy/paste text from a web page. It’s more of a ‘nice to have’ feature rather than a ‘make or break’ feature of a mobile browser and the way Opera has made something so simple into an unnecessarily frustrating chore, it’s not even worth having. I don’t see why I have to go into a text selection mode then have to fight with the awful touch response to select the desired text. I’m not even going to tell you how long or how many tries it took me to get this screenshot but needless to say, I gave up on selecting text right after I got it. Perhaps it would have been easier if I had used a larger font size but alas.
Copy and paste gets an additional step
Finally able to highlight the whole first paragraph
Now while there are a couple flaws that I’ve gone over, keep in mind that this is beta software and far from the finished product. It’s a good thing too because Opera Mini 5 is certainly not ready for primetime yet. If you have any questions, concerns or what to share your own experiences with Opera Mini 5, please feel free to do so below in the Comments section.
Download
Visit opera.com/mini/next/ to learn more or m.opera.com/next from your N97 browser to download.
Related Articles:
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