[General Topics] Menneisyys:
Opera Mini, as of version 4.1, has become a really-really decent alternative to other Web browsers, particularly if you need a free solution. As it’s a MIDlet, it’s compatible with almost every phone out there – even feature phones. This means you get exactly the same menus, the same shortcuts on, say, your wife’s low-end feature phone and your smartphone.

It requires a separate environment, a MIDlet manager, to run. I’ve elaborated on the different MIDlet managers available for Windows Mobile in the MIDlet Bible, which you definitely should read if you want to get introduced to the wonderful world of MIDlets. (Note that you won’t necessarily need to read it if your only aim is to be able to install and use Opera Mini 4.1; then, all you’ll need to do is reading my 4.1 deployment and usage tutorial.)

As of the current (4.1beta) version, it offers even file upload, address autocompletion and page saving capabilities. Full page view is also supported (which has been added in version 4.0), retaining the full layout of the original page - as opposed to the one-column view. Incidentally, it’s this that you can see in the above screenshot too.

Its only problem is the lack of arbitrary text copying from Web pages. This could easily be fixed as is done in Russian Opera Mod (an unofficial and, unfortunately, illegal modification of the original Opera Mini) – feeding the textual page contents to a text input area, where it can already be copied to the clipboard if the particular MIDlet manager allows for this (all of them do on all the three reviewed mobile platforms; the only exception is the discontinued and outdated TAO Intent MIDlet manager on Windows Mobile).

As it’s a proxy-based solution, it has far less data usage; however, it can’t access local files (files in the file system) and the additional processing can take some time (typically, between 5 and 30 secs).

Thanks to extensive hacking, direct invocation has also been implemented (originally by me), which greatly enhances its usability on Windows Mobile because it lets for being directly invoked when you click a link in an e-mail or Office document. This isn’t as important on Symbian and BlackBerry because it’s far easier to copy / paste e-mail links in these operating systems (when you step over a link, it’ll be highlighted at once; then, you can copy it to the clipboard at once [as opposed to the, in this regard, much slower and more awkward Windows Mobile]; pasting to Opera Mini’s address input field is equally easy and quick), should you want to avoid using their built-in, respective browsers (for example in order to keep data usage down.)

Finally, still on the subject of Symbian and BlackBerry: while all public builds of version 4.0 frequently (about once a day) crashed on these platforms, I haven’t ever encountered any crashes with 4.1. That is, you won’t ever need to remove and reinsert the battery in order to reset your handsets.

Thuderhawk has a long history on Pocket PC’s. (It also had a MS Smartphone-compliant version, but only for low-res, 176*220 screens, and a QVGA version has never been released for this platform.) Unfortunately, it also seems it’s no longer worked upon as the developer has entirely switched to a MIDlet-based solution to directly compete with Opera Mini. (Which is more than hard as Opera Mini is really-really good.)

Thuderhawk’s biggest advantage has always been it being based on its own fontset (BitStream is also a font designer company), which makes original-layout, full page rendering possible even on 320-wide (QVGA) screens by using special, narrow, but perfectly readable fonts not otherwise available under Windows Mobile. Note that IEM can use similar fonts to look pretty much the same condensed as is explained HERE; the lower right screenshot shows exactly this, while the upper one shows a typical forum page rendered on a 320-wide screen without any need to do any horizontal scrolling.

Unfortunately, being based on a custom fontset means Thunderhawk only supports Western characters; meaning no support for most Eastern European or oriental languages. With Eastern-European, non-cyrillic languages like Polish, Romanian, Hungarian, Czech, Slovakian, Slovenian etc. that use alphabets pretty close to Western languages, this can be somewhat fixed by converting their special, Unicode-only characters to 8859-1 on the server side; with fully Unicode languages, on the other hand, this can’t be done.

Thunderhawk has no support for hi-res ((W)VGA) screens (it displays contents at QVGA effective resolution); doesn’t let for any kind of page / link target saving at all and doesn’t even support copying to the clipboard from Web pages. It doesn‘t use client-side web page / image caching at all (meaning, at times, it may result in far bigger data usage than most of the alternatives); it is only able to download files to built-in storage (not to storage cards or other, alternative media); it has absolutely no support for file upload etc.

Microsoft Deepfish should also be mentioned, which was more of a pilot project slightly more than a year ago to see how server-side content rendering with plain image-based client-server communication works. It wasn’t anything to write home about: because of the client’s being based on the (comparatively) slow Compact Framework and the middle tier server’s being overloaded, it was pretty slow in real use. It’s been discontinued in the meantime. It’s still not known whether it’ll be reused in future Microsoft browsers – for example, in the IE6 port slated for later this year.

Now, let’s take a look at the IEM plug-ins, which greatly extend the functionality (but, alas, not the Web standard compliance / conformance) of IEM.

These plug-ins greatly extend IEM’s capabilities: they add multitab (multiple document) support, resource (page / link target / image) saving, User-Agent GUI-based setting; they let for using hardware buttons for much easier navigation / function access, address bar macros, altering the way the document is scrolled by D-pad etc.; some of them even have GPS-based, location-dependent services.)

* PIEPlus is probably the best and most featureful (resource saving, support for hardware button reassignment etc.). For pre-WM2003SE users (“One Column” was only introduced in WM2003SE), it has a unique feature not offered by other PIE plug-ins: the Pocket View one-column view

* MultiIE is also a decent IEM plug-in; albeit, it’s in no way better than PIEPlus any more (unlike in the past). Basically, it has a similar feature set as PIEPlus.