[Non-Touchscreen Windows Mobile Other] Menneisyys:
I’ve always loved Opera’s Web browsers. On the desktop with a screen having a higher-than-average resolution (say, at least SXGA+), their free desktop Opera browser is by far the best and most useful browser because it’s the only browser with (nearly) flawless dynamic zoom capabilities. On non-dumbphone (that is, in our case, native Windows Mobile) platforms, their Opera Mobile browser is, despite in some lacking functionality and bugs, currently (as of version 8.65 and end of August, 2007) is the best browser. Finally, as far as Java-capable “dumb” phones are concerned, their Java-based and, what is more, FREE Opera Mini is simply the BEST browser out there.

The Opera folks released the first beta of their brand new, 4 series of Opera Mini this June. I’ve reviewed it in the MS Smartphone Web Browsing Bible. Then, it had some annoying bugs and midlet manager (environments to run Java midlets, including Opera Mini) vendor-specific problems (particularly the crashing / quitting problem on (fortunately, only) one Midlet manager and the “too large fonts” problems on all QVGA handhelds).

Fortunately, these problems / bugs seem to have all been fixed. Read on to find out what has changed in the last 2.5 months!

(a VGA screenshot)

(Note that the screenshots were done with the Esmertec Jbed Midlet manager on my HTC Vox / s710 (QVGA Smartphone) and the Tao Intent Midlet manager on the HTC Universal. I’ve also published some other screenshots with some other configurations showing for example Esmertec Jbed running on the latter VGA HTC Universal Pocket PC. Also see the “The Midlet Managers used in the article – how come some of the screenshots are full screen, you may ask” section below for more info on all these questions.)

First, let’s compare the new version to the old. Please read the MS Smartphone Web Browsing Bible (and the “original” Pocket PC Web Browsing Bible linked from it) to get a FULL picture of what Opera Mini is, how it compares to other Windows Mobile browsers etc.

The good

In addition to fixing the font size bug (see below), a new font size, “Extra large”, has been added. With that, the screenshots below (which have been made with the default “Medium” size) are as follows:

(VGA screenshot on the HTC Universal running the latest TAO Intent JVM)

For comparison, with “Small”, the same is as follows:

(VGA screenshot; plain Esmertec JVM QVGA Smartphone screenshot)

There is a brand new submenu, assigned to phonepad button “1”, which offers, in addition to quickly changing between fit to width and full layout modes, reloading and page information, also offers a Link context menu, which allows for opening a given link (you can force it to do this without images) and getting information (that is, the link address; unfortunately, you can’t, say, copy it to the clipboard (screenshot)):

Unfortunately, there’s still no way of parallel loading of more than one link – or, to, say, return to the current page so that you can go on reading it if you initiate the loading of a page from your favorites / bookmarks. These would be more than welcome because, especially with large(r) pages and/or slower and/or not frequently accessed servers, loading times can be pretty high – even in the range of 30-60 seconds.