Opera Mobile 11.10 brings the mobile browser wars
Kat tries out the mobile browser that gives HTML5 support to almost any smartphone
OPERA MINI: SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL
If you’re very conscious of the bandwidth limitations of your mobile phone contract, or if your mobile device doesn’t have much processor power, then you’ll be pleased to know that the lightweight Opera Mini 6 has been released simultaneously. While Opera Mobile handles its own rendering, Mini 6 accesses websites via Opera’s own compression servers, which can reduce the amount of data being retrieved by your phone by up to 90% – handy if you only get a data allowance of 500MB per month.
Popular sites are cached on Opera’s compression servers to further speed up load times, but no identifying data is retained. Opera Mini has many of the same features as Mobile, including tabs and bookmark syncing. It doesn’t support Flash or HTML5, but it’s very lightweight and effectively cuts your data consumption, which is just the ticket if you need to access to web in an area with limited mobile broadband speeds.
Opera Mobile 11 can be installed under Android, Windows Phone 7, Symbian and MeeGo, while Opera Mini 6 works on iOS devices, Symbian, Blackberry, and phones that use J2ME Java apps. You can find all versions at http://www.opera.com/mobile/download/.
