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Pros
- Accurate page rendering.
- Transparent UI.
- Supports multiple tabs, bookmark folders, and other desktop-like browser features.
- Clever zoom-view management minimizes page scrolling.
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Cons
- Still no Flash support.
- Page rendering issues with weak 3G signals.
Opera Mobile 9.7 Beta Specs
| Type: | Business |
| Type: | Personal |
Consumers expect more from mobile Web browsers these days. While Palm Treo owners surfed WAP pages on the go with Blazer as far back as 2003, today it's a different story. Device-specific pages, native apps, and even full desktop page rendering (a la the iPhone) are supplanting WAP pages. Opera Software has been working hard on mobile browsing for years.
Opera Mobile 9.7 Beta has borrowed some of Opera Mini's tricks, such as server-side compression that reduces bandwidth consumption by up to 80 percent—and speeds up page rendering accordingly. The new version also supports Google Gears—enabled Web applications, as well as Opera's own widget platform. It also features OpenGL ES acceleration for smoother page scrolling. Finally, beginning with this version, you can install the browser on a storage card, if desired. For this review, I tested Opera Mobile 9.7 Beta on a
Opera Mobile's Interface
The home screen is a simple affair, with a Google search bar at the top and some Opera-related links in the middle. The default browsing mode displays a full-page view, without any user interface bars. Click or tap on the page, and two bars appear: an address bar at the top with a refresh button, and a bottom bar with the icons back, favorite, tab, home, and menu. The browser supports tabs; you can open new ones by clicking the tab button and choosing New Tab, or by pressing and holding the stylus on any link, which pops up a context menu offering to open the link in a new tab, as well as copy the link address or share it with others.
Click the address bar, meanwhile, and an on-screen keyboard appears with an extra Google search bar. A type-ahead feature fills in URLs after keying in just a few letters. Since the initial view is zoomed out, you can't read text right away. But a simple double-tap zooms in just far enough to read individual columns on a news page. You can flick pages up and down to scroll if your handset is touch-enabled—or just use the control pad if it isn't. Scrolling also works with the stylus and, if your device has one, a joystick. A special mobile view reformats pages to fit the screen without scrolling, but then you lose much of the benefit of rendering desktop-class pages in the first place.
Opera Mobile includes a full-fledged download manager that lets you stop or cancel downloads. You can save downloads to a temporary folder, or run apps immediately upon completion. Bookmark management is even more flexible, with a dedicated Add Bookmark icon, support for folders, and bookmark sharing via SMS, MMS, or e-mail. The browser groups your Web history by date, and you can clear it by tapping the delete button. The Settings menu, meanwhile, offers some privacy controls for clearing cookies and the cache, as well as the ability to disable JavaScript and other plug-ins.
Surfing the Web with Opera Mobile 9.7 was a pleasure, for the most part. Desktop Web sites looked excellent, and I enjoyed the fast tab and bookmark management. There's still no Adobe Flash support, which means things like Web animations and video streaming from YouTube or Hulu are still out. Another, more insidious, problem was with disappearing text. Often, I'd begin reading text on a new page, only to see it all disappear again for 30 to 45 seconds while the page continued to load. It seemed to relate to cellular signal strength, but it happened often enough to become annoying. If you show me the text once, just leave it there if the signal hiccups—don't keep taking it away! Opera may want to fine-tune the way the app handles each step of the rendering process to account for uneven data signal.
Opera Mobile's main competition on Windows Mobile these days is
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