Even though it was released  last summer, I've only recently got around to properly trying out the Opera Mini browser from Opera Software, but I found that it actually gives a really decent web experience on a mobile device.

Opera Mini works somewhat like the Safari browser in Apple's iPhone, in that it shrinks a web page so that the whole of it is displayed on the handset's screen. Of course, this makes it too small to actually read anything, but you can easily zoom in to any part of the page you are interested in.

It doesn't feature the gesture-based controls of Apple's browser, but a simple tap on the screen with a stylus is arguably quicker, and the browser's back button zooms out again just as quickly.

Unlike Safari, Opera Mini is a thin client browser. This means that web requests are handled by a proxy server operated by Opera, which renders each page and compresses it before sending the resulting page image down to the phone. This means that less data gets sent to your handset, and so browsing eats up less of your monthly data plan.

I tested Opera Mini on a Windows Mobile 6 device, and found it handled many common web pages such as BBC News Online very well. However, it does trip up on web-based applications that test for supported browsers before proceeding.

Browsing was reasonably fast, even over a GPRS connection, and even faster when we switched to a Wi-Fi access point. Best of all, Opera Mini is a free download, and works on a broad range of handsets that support Java.

01 Feb 2008