Phone Deluxe

Since Opera Mobile 10 beta was released I have been testing it and comparing it with Opera Mini 5 beta. It’s my main browser now, so as you can imagine it has to be better than the other two I compared it with! As soon as I run Opera Mobile 10, the instant thought was: “Did I pressed Opera Mini by mistake?”, but despite looking exactly like it’s java brother Opera Mini, this version was completely in another level!

Let’s start with the bad things I noticed in Opera Mobile!

Let’s say I’m browsing a forum (tested this with 4 different forums (2 phpBB and 2 Woltlab) as a logged-in member… From one moment to the other you have to login again! And it’s completely random! I was able to stay logged in for 1 hour in one of them, but had to login 3 times in 5 minutes in the next hour. Luckily logging-in was made very easy by the password manager but it is still very annoying specially when you get logged out when you’re about to see a topic with the title “Nokia starts shipping the N900“. The S60 built-in browser never did this to me and neither Opera Mini. Another bad thing i noticed after using Opera Mini for so long was the crippled zoom-in/zoom-out and scrool in the pages :S . Opera Mini renders the page and when you zoom-in you can start reading right away, but with Opera Mobile 10 you have like half a second of waiting untill the browser can focus the letters and you’re actually able to read anything. When zooming-out andscrolling you see those ugly, annoying squares that scream “GET A DECENT BROWSER” in every screen pixel. Another half a second wait untill the page get’s fully rendered again. Since they have Opera Mini working so fine why can’t they do the same with Opera Mobile? Next problem in Opera Mobile: RAM consuming. This was the first app that got me thinking: “poor N95-1 users, this app will barely run in theyre devices. I mean seriously, Quake II doesn’t eat this much RAM, not even close! I got to the extreme of having this app using up 70MB of RAM (9 tabs opened, but still… 70MB??? Firefox 3.5.5 on my Windows XP doesn’t need that much with 2 or 3 tabsopened).

Scared with my negative thoughts on the Opera Mobile 10? Well, I have some good news: the bad news about Opera Mobile are over! Apart from those and some casual hang-up (caused by my app-abusing, like trying to open tabs as fast as I could and tell the app to load 4 and 5 tabs at the same time ) no problems were found on Opera Mobile!

Let’s get to the good part of it!

I’ll kick off with the bug fixes I saw from the Mini 5 version. Switching between portrait and landscape mode is now a real pleasure! In the Mini version every time i changed the screen orientation I had to reload the page, to get the text fitting the screen again. With Opera Mobile the page just renders correctly without any data transferring needed! Another good thing is the right position of the soft key action text on the screen. When I switch to landscape on my N95 using Opera Mini I get “Menu” in the bottom left side of the screen and “Back” in the bottom right. That would be correct if I had, let’s say the E71, but since that isn’t the case these texts weren’t in the right position. With Opera Mobile I could see the “Menu” in the bottom right and the “Back” in the upper right and thats the right placement for the N95 when in landscape.

Another great feature in the Mobile version is the support for downloads inside the app itself. If you ever tried to download anything using Opera Mini 5, you know that what it does is just opening the S60 default browser and downloading the file from there. With Opera Mobile you can’t just download from Opera itself, but also choose the folder were you want to save the file wich you can’t when using the Mini version.

Another good thing i spotted in Opera Mobile is the support for .gif images. Mini version showed them as stopped images. I was glad to see the .gif’s moving like they should in Opera Mobile.

Now for the unforgettable advantage. It’s a proper .sis application and not some java one. As a result from this we get a much more responsive app and since it has some cool visual effects, it’s very eye pleasant when compared to the sluggish java Opera Mini.

Talked about what was new when comparing to Mini, but I still have to refer some excellent features that Opera Mini also has.

The password manager is just one of the best things they could have in this browser. Specially on a mobile phone were writing passwords can get difficult having them all stored and just have to hit the login button is a big plus. Of course we can ask if it’s safe to have all our password stored in our mobile phone as it can get robbed, so I still advice not to save any bank account, e-bay, amazon, paypal passwords in your phone.

The tabbed browsing is awesome. And when I say awesome, I really mean AWESOME! In the Mobile version specially changing between tabs is not only easy and practical, but it’s almost a pleasure to see the nice effects Opera has packed into Opera Mobile.

Before finishing this review I couldn’t help myself and write a to-do list for Opera:

• Better RAM management. Seriously some 64MB RAM phones must have a really hard time to open more than one tab. And taking the tabbed browsing away is a big loss in Opera Mobile strength.
• Fix those sudden log-outs when I’m on a forum. This doesn’t happen to me in the Mini version, so it must be fixable!
• The in-line editing lacks some features like making a new paragraph and a symbol table like the built-in one. It’s also hard to understand how the Caps system work, so I suggest to do like the built-in browser. In-line writing but using the default controls. There is no support for intelligent writing while this mode is turned on either.

This is it! I’ll be adding a few demonstrating videos to this post later, because this review was actually a video review initially, but due to having 700MB of size, firefox just went crazy when I tried to upload it to YouTube, so I have no other chance then uploading some smaller videos .

You can download Opera Mobile 10 beta from here and Opera Mini 5 beta here!