Wowser! Opera Software released a second Beta of both Opera Mobile 10 and Opera Mini 5 today. I really didn't expect a new release until after the holidays. I've been playing with the new versions for about an hour now and I like what I see. Here are my impressions.
The big changes are the addition of some of the most requested features that were missing from the first Beta
- Opera Link which synchronizes bookmarks, speed dial shortcuts and custom search shortcuts between multiple copies of Opera Mini, Mobile and Desktop.
- A Download Manager that lets you download in the background and view a list of completed and in process downloads with options to Pause, Open, Delete or Clear any of the downloads.
- Pressing # or * now brings up a list of available shortcuts as it does in Opera Mini 3.1 and 4.2. And there is a "Cancel" option now that lets you escape from accidental presses of # and *.
- You can switch from inline to full-screen editing on a field by field basis without going into the settings menu. When you are in an edit field in inline mode a long press on the "OK" button (or screen on touchscreen phones) brings up a context menu (image, bottom right) with the "Fullscreen Edit" option. Both input methods have their advantages. With Inline mode you can see the rest of the screen - especially handy when entering Captchas. Fullscreen editing enables t-9 and symbol mode and allows copy and pasting to and from the system clipboard.
- On touchscreen devices, the virtual keyboard now offers an "Enter" key when editing multi-line fields (image, bottom left).
I suspect that there are a lot of bug fixes in the new releases as well. I noticed a couple in Opera Mobile 10.
- Opening Google Groups or vBulletin sites like HowardForums in mobile view no longer causes Opera Mobile 10 to hang. However switching from mobile to desktop view in Google Groups now crashes Opera Mobile 10 on my Nokia N95-3.
- Opera Mobile 10 seems to shut down more cleanly. When I exited Beta 1 the Opera Mobile process would appear keep running in the Task manager for a minute or two and attempting to restart Opera while it was in that state would fail. I'm able to close and immediately reopen Beta 2.
Opera 10's memory footprint is noticeably smaller in Beta 2. I repeated the memory tests that I ran on Beta 1 with new release. Results are summarized in the table below. The first number represents the amount of free memory on the device after loading the browser and each of 3 large pages in separate tabs. The second number is the amount of memory consumed by the browser at that point. While Opera still uses a lot of memory and will probably never work very well on phones with very limited memory like the original N95-1, it's really no worse in memory consumption than the Nokia Webkit browser when browsing large pages.
Opera Mobile 10 Beta 1
Opera Mobile 10 Beta 2
Nokia Browser
Browser Only
82/11
82/11
88/5
GoMo News 2.3 MB
56/37
72/21
71/21
BBC Homepage 455 KB
52/41
67/26
65/28 *
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posted by Dennis Bournique
December 2, 2009 @ 12:39 pm
7 View Comments
