Hands-On With the ATT.NET (Opera Mini) Browser

I spent some time recently playing with the AT&T branded version of Opera Mini that the operator is using as its default browser on at least four new devices.  The Pantech Reveal, released earlier this month, is the  first phone with the new browser.

AT&T seemes to have overlooked WapReview again in handing out review units to bloggers so I had to try the Reveal out at my local AT&T shop.

The new browser is branded as att.net. Opera's name doesn't appear anywhere on the phone. There's not even an "About" screen acknowledging the browser's origin.  For anyone familiar wih Opera Mini, it's pretty easy to see att.net's parentage in some of the menus and  the way pages are rendered. The browser's User Agent header doesn't hide Opera's contribution. It's:

PantechC790/JAUS08312009; Mozilla/5.0 (Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1; Opera Mini/att/4.2.14866; U; en-US) Opera 9.50 UP.Link/6.3.1.20.

att.net doesn't look much like Opera Mini, especially the initial screen which has three tabs;

• "Web" with the enter URL field, Yahoo search box and six large "My Favorite" buttons that you can assign to your most used sites.
• Local" with weather, local search, movie listings and local news.  The page's location is originally tied to your account's billing address but it's supposed to use cell-id based location to update as you move around.
• "Popular" with the latest News, Sports and Entertainment headlines.

Once you open a web page with the att.net browser it starts to look and act much more like Opera Mini 4.2 with fast loads of virtually any Web page, very good rendering and a choice of Opera's fit to width "Mobile View"  or zoomable "Desktop View" options.  The menus, soft keys and shortcuts are basically the same as Opera Mini's. A nice edition to att.net is the "inline editing"  feature from the Opera Mini 5 Beta. All editing of text fields in web forms is done inline instead of in a separate window.  Thanks to the Reveal's QWERTY keyboard, inline editing works very well with upper and lower case letters and special characters all available directly from the keyboard using the Shift and Alt keys.  Numbers are entered with the 9-key phone keypad which remains active when the QWERTY keyboard is slid out.

However, AT&T has inexplicably removed a number of Opera Mini's standard features.

• "*" plus 1-9 "Speed Dial" shortcuts to your favorite sites are missing.  The "My Favorites" feature does partially compensate for this.  You can press "0" or "#" + "4" to jump to the home page and scroll to and click one of your favorites. That works but requires more keypresss than with Speed Dials.
• There's no popup menu listing the browser's menu short cuts.  Except for the Speed Dials most of the standard Opera Mini hotkey shortuts are still available. But they don't seem to be documented in the online help or anywhere else.  Here's a complete list of Opera Mini's  shortcuts and what does and doesn't work on the Reveal:

0 - Homepage (att.net only, this is not a standard Opera Mini shortcut)
1 - Context menu offering desktop and mobile view toggle, page and link information, refresh and image zoom.
2 - Page Up
4- Page Left
5 - Zoom In/Out in Desktop View
6 - Page Right
8 - Page Down
* 1-9 - Speed Dial Shortcuts (don't work, use "My Favorites" instead.)
* 0  - RSS Feed Reader
* * -

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posted by Dennis Bournique
October 28, 2009 @ 11:46 am
7 View Comments