Opera Mini 5 Beta - First Impressions

Early this morning Opera Software released the long awaited  first Beta of Opera Mini 5.  You can get it by pointing your phone's built in browser at mini.opera.com/next.  Or download the .jad and .jar fles or the Blackberry .alx and .cod to your PC for side loading from opera.com/mini/next/download/

Opera Mini 5 is bigger at 221 KB than its 125 KB predecessor and uses more phone resources.  Given the new features this is to be expected but it also means that some older or lower end phones that can run Opera Mini 4.2 will not be able to use Opera Mini 5. In particular, Palm OS devices and BlackBerries running OS 4.1 are no longer supported.  There is also no Android version of Opera Mini 5 yet although one is promised. Opera Mini 5 is optimized for  screen sizes of 240x320 and larger.  It will work on smaller screens but some menu options will be off screen and unreachable. You should be able to work around this using Opera Mini's keyboard shortcuts.

New features in this release are:

• Completely Redesigned GUI With Enhanced Touchscreen Support - Previous versions of Opera Mini are not very touch friendly with tiny, hard to click menu options and  issues with scrolling and getting touches to register. Opera Mini 5 was designed to be touch aware.

The GUI on touch screen phones is completely different than what non-touch devices get. It has a bottom menu (image top right)that can be hidden and replaced with a couple of transparent buttons (image above right). There is also a URL bar fixed to the the top of the screen that can't be hidden although it disappears when you scroll down..

Non-touch phones have their menu and URL bars at the top.  Both are hidden by default when a page is loaded (image above left). A press on the left soft key brings up the menu together with the URL bar (image top left).  Pressing  the # + 1 shortcut brings up the URL bar by itself.  Both  can be hidden with a press on the right soft key

There are many other differences between the touch and non-touch variants as well. The images on this page show Opera Mini 5 running on the non-touch Mokia N95-3 on the left and the touch screen Microemulator on the right.

• Tabbed Browsing - This is something users have been requesting for years.  It works very well. Opening tabs and switching (image above) between them is instantaneous. The number of tabs appears to be limited only by available memory. I had eight tabs open on my N95-3 with no noticeable performance degradation.

• Password Manager - When you log into a password protected site you are prompted if you want Opera Mini to save the user name and password.  If you say yes, Opera will pre-populate those fields for you on subsequent visits. The saved passwords are stored on the device. A password manager should be especially useful with  Opera Mini which  has traditionally had serious issues with its cloud based cookie retention.

• In-line Text Input - This optional feature lets you type directly into text fields or the URL bar instead of having to first click on a field to bring up the phone's native editor and then having to

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posted by Dennis Bournique
September 16, 2009 @ 1:56 pm
7 View Comments