Opera Mini: A New Browser For Mobile Devices
Opera Software, the Norwegian company that created the sleek Opera web browser back in the mid 1990s, has released the Opera Mini browser for mobile phones and PDAs. The browser was tested among an estimated 1 million users in Europe in the fall of 2005 and is now available worldwide as a free download.
Opera Mini runs on any phone with Java mobile (J2ME) compatibility and an internet connection. Here is a list of compatible devices. Notice the list is quite extensive. It seems that Opera Mini is designed to run on not only the newest handhelds, but also on lower-end and mid-range phones, some of which are four years old. There’s no support for BREW, but any modern phone that can handle Java apps should be able to install and use the browser.
Opera has also found a way to minimize download times and bandwidth consumption, two factors that are especially key when dealing with mobile devices. When a page is requested, it’s compressed and formatted for your specific device by Opera’s servers before it’s transmitted to your phone. From the Opera Mini FAQ:
When surfing with Opera Mini, Web pages are optimized and compressed before being sent to your phone. This means that even though your mobile provider may charge you for the data which is transferred to your phone, the amount of data transferred is significantly less than it would normally be, making mobile surfing cheaper.
Earlier this month, Opera announced that Google would serve as its official search partner across all Opera browsers.
[Link via digg]
