The best mobile surfing experience out there?
By:Neil Berman
Back in Feb Opera demo'd their latest Windows Mobile browser to oohs & ahhs from all corners championing it over the iPhone. Sporting a slick fullscreen mode, copy & paste, downloads and image saving, WM users couldn't wait to get their mitts on it. It's been a long wait but the beta recently went public. So is it really that much better than the iPhone? Let's see...
After a straightforward installation and launch Opera 9.5 was happily loading pages over both WiFi and T-Mobile's EDGE service. The browser fitted rendered pages to fill the whole screen perfectly and from there the finger pointing begins. Swipe up, down, left or right to scroll, double tap any area to zoom and again to zoom back out. The motion as the page moves is beautifully fluid and the zoom renders quickly.Page loading was slower than my Nokia N810, which also runs Opera, but this is a pre-production version so it's unfair to make a performance judgement just yet. As a guide over WiFi the NY Times website was half rendered in about 8 seconds and I was able to start swiping/zooming after 25 seconds while the pictures finished loading in the background. When I went to the site a second time, I could start swiping/zooming after about 15 seconds due to caching. Times were about twice as long with EDGE.
There are various display options, including full vs mobile view and screen font size. Images can be blocked to speed up page delivery.
Multiple tabs are also available, although your device's capabilities will determine how many you can open before running low on memory. Opera 9.5 Mobile is a 8.9MB install which needs to go into main memory for this beta release. However the cache can be put onto a storage card, I allocated 50MB which speeds things up if you visit the same sites regularly.
So from this fully rendered CNet home page, you can zoom into something like this in a second or two...
...and then jump into a story...
...turn on text selection like this...
...and copy the text you want into an email or document just like a normal computer web browser. You can send it directly to someone via SMS as well as the page link, which is even better. You can also send links and images directly via MMS or email. Images and files can be downloaded to main memory or to the storage card for easy portability. Whole pages can be downloaded for offline viewing, for example when in the subway. Hmm, this is sounding like the daddy of convergent mobile internet...
Various other config optionsare included, including the ability to set a cache size. Here's my 50MB cache in action, if you're a heavy user you may want to go for more. I'm unaware of any cache limit, my TyTN has a 2GB memory card in it...that kind of cache size might be overkill but you get the idea!
Security options include proper password management.With the current beta version there are a couple of missing bits, such as ActiveX and Flash so if you want these you might prefer to wait until the full production release. Also bear in mind that this is a beta version so if you do install it on your phone there may be compatibility issues or other freaky things happening - best to backup beforehand just in case!.Overall there's no smartphone browser I'm aware of which offers such a sweet all round browsing experience. The initial impressions in February were right: where the iPhone's Safari once led the pack, it's now in second place. Can't wait to try the production version...
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