Son Of The Engadget Demobilizer - A New Bookmarklet To View Engadget's Desktop Version In Opera Mini

One of my favorite tech news sites, engadget.com, recently started forcing Opera Mini users to a new mobile version of the site that looks like it was designed for legacy dumb phone browsers (image, left).

I could live with the boring plain text on a white background, but not with the severely degraded and distorted images. But the worst part of the new design is the pagination, which breaks most articles into multiple tiny pages. Even on dumbphones, Opera Mini can load extremely large pages, so the pagination is completely unnecessary.

The same thing happened about a year ago with a different Engadget mobile version, but I was able to cobble together an Opera Mini bookmarklet that, when run on any Engadget mobile page, loaded the desktop version of the same page. That bookmarket doesn't work with the new mobile version of the site, but I was able to modify it a bit and to create one that does.

To use the new bookmarklet, copy the code below into a browser bookmark.

javascript:var%20s=location.href;b=s.lastIndexOf('m.');s=s.slice(b+2);location.href='http://m.engadget.com/link.do?url=http://'+s+'?m=false';

If you're using a browser that doesn't support copy/paste, like Opera Mini 4 or the Symbian browser, click here and follow the instructions on that page to install the bookmarket.

When you land on one of the paginated Engadget mobile pages, go to you bookmarks and click the bookmarklet and the desktop version of the same page will load.