Update; The latest release of Opera Mini is version 3.1, read about it here.
There is a new beta of the next release of Opera Mini available for download. I'm sure you've heard of Opera Mini, but in case you haven't, it's a free Java ME browser that is faster, more capable and has a more efficient UI than almost any of the browsers that come pre-installed on phones. There's a page of information about the new release and download instructions here. New features in this release are:
As a confirmed Opera Mini user I was eager to try out the new version. Although Opera Mini is great, there are a few small annoyances that I was hoping would be fixed in the new version.
I was especially wanted to see if a scrolling issue that apparently only effects Motorola phones was fixed. When you scroll a page with images, Opera Mini 2 will freeze for a second or two before it scrolls an image into view. Un-selecting "high quality" images in the Mini options helps somewhat. It isn't really that bad, Mini is still better than the built-in browser which takes forever to render images and can't handle pages with more than a couple full screen images. I don't think many users would have complained except that the early versions of Mini before 2.0 scrolled images with almost no hesitation. It was obvious that Opera had changed something that worsened the user experience on Motorolas. There is a long thread on the official Mini forum with Motorola owners complaining about the problem and the Opera moderator "ManneS" promising that a fix was coming. Some users went back to using the last version of Mini 1.0 (1.2.3214), but that didn't work for me because 1.0 uses a tiny font that can't be changed and which I found too small for comfort. Mini 2.0 in the High memory version gives a choice of four fonts including a couple that I could read without eyestrain.
Another improvement I was hoping for was accesskey support. If you are a regular reader of this blog you know I'm a fanatic about accesskeys on mobile pages. Unfortunately Opera Mini, almost alone among mobile browsers, doesn't support the accesskey standard. I'd made a feature request for accesskeys on the Mini forum and was hoping they had made it into this release.
Many people have been asking that Mini support file uploads of various types including photos. The camera on my i855 is so bad that I have little desire to use it let alone upload the photos anywhere, but I was curious to see if the new photo upload feature actually worked on a Motorola iDen phone on the Nextel network (Shozu doesn't).
First I had to find a way to get the beta on my phone. My carrier Nextel, blocks downloading Java apps from anywhere but their Cellmania online store and Opera is only offering the beta download OTA from a wml page. So I fired up Firefox and with the WML Browser and User Agent Switcher extensions, set the user agent to "MOT-A-3D" which identifies the browser as a Motorola i855, downloaded the .jad file, opened the .jad (which is just a text file) in notepad and copied the .jar url from the .jad into the browser's address bar to download the .jar file. Then I fired up WebJAL (It's a "liberated" Motorola developer tool that lets you load Java apps and ringtones) and sideloaded Opera Mini 3.0 onto my phone. I tried the high memory version first as it has always worked on the i855 before. The beta installed but when I ran it the phone spontaneously rebooted! I tried again a few times with the same result. So I repeated the drill to get and load the low memory version - and it worked!
Wow, what an improvement. The low memory version now offers a
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posted by Dennis Bournique
November 2, 2006 @ 8:58 pm
7 View Comments
