Opera speeds up mobile browsing with new Mini beta

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 3 Apr 2008 at 12:03

Opera claims to have boosted mobile surfing speeds by up to 50% with a new version of its Mini browser.

The company attributes the speed boost to an upgrade of its servers, which compress normal web pages by up to 90% to make them suitable for viewing on mobile phones with limited data connections.

In our brief tests of the Opera Mini 4.1 beta this morning, we noticed sites such as BBC News and Facebook loaded appreciably faster than in previous versions, although the 50% figure seems a little optimistic at first glance.

Other new features also help improve the speed of the mobile browser. The address bar now includes an autocomplete feature, which saves having to laboriously bash out the full web address of sites you've previously visited, and is particularly effective on phones that don't feature a full QWERTY keypad.

There's also a new option to save web pages to the phone's memory, which means that you don't have to rack up the data bill twice if you only get halfway through a long article before being interrupted, for example.

Files can now be uploaded and downloaded directly from the Mini browser, allowing users to transfer photos taken with the phone's camera to their blog, for instance.

As ever, the new beta can be run alongside an existing Opera Mini installation and can be downloaded from the Opera Mini site.