First look: Opera Mini 4

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Posted on 7 Nov 2007 at 12:45

Opera has unveiled the latest version of its Mini mobile phone browser.

The browser has benefited from two major enhancements since we previewed the first beta of Opera Mini 4 back in June.

The browser aims to replicate the desktop surfing experience, by providing a small image of the full web page and allowing the user to scroll around and zoom in on the parts of the page they wish to read.

In our earlier preview we found that this made websites hard to scan at-a-glance, as the page was so condensed that it became unreadable.
Clearly wary of the problem, Opera has now added a landscape view option, which makes it far easier to navigate sites on phones with widescreens, such as our Nokia N73 test handset.

The surfing experience is still far from perfect: headlines and most pictures are still largely indecipherable from the initial page preview, even in widescreen. But if you're familiar with the layout of the page, it's easy to zoom into the section and scrolling around the page while zoomed-in is impressively slick.

The second newcomer is synchronisation with Opera's desktop browser, so that you can easily share bookmarks between your PC and mobile phone. The obvious problem here is that while (if Opera is to be believed) Mini is the world's most popular mobile browser, Opera desktop remains extremely niche, and it would have been nice to see synchronisation with more popular browsers.

Opera Mini 4 is clearly best for grabbing information on the go, and not intensive, long periods of surfing. It handles sites such as BBC News, Facebook and PC Pro.co.uk with aplomb, although you can largely forget about watching any video content (a blessing in disguise given the UK's ludicrous mobile data charges).

The integrated Yahoo search hunts down websites, news stories and even Flickr images with minimal fuss, and the integrated RSS feed reader makes scanning the headlines on your favourite sites painless.

Once again, Opera appears to have raised the bar with mobile browsers. The big question is will Google implement the browser in its new Android platform or plough ahead with one of its own?

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Author: Barry Collins