Miles’ Blog

Opera Mini has opened the door to a better browsing experience, especially for Java-enabled mobile phones that can currently only access WAP content. Get Opera Mini 4 beta.

If you’ve not used Opera Mini before, it allows you to browse the web on almost any Java enabled phone, even very basic feature phones. Like Opera Mobile, it can display the regular web sites using (X)HTML, CSS and JavaScript (but doesn’t include Ajax due to client server limitations). It is much more powerful than other browsers in its class, which require special WAP 2 content. This is due to it using the latest version of our
Core-2 rendering engine found in Opera Kestrel and the Nintendo Wii browser, plus our client server architecture that allows us to render the web page on the server, and send it to the browser as a compressed binary; both reducing the file size, bandwidth costs to the user, and increasing the download speed.

You can customise the pages you create by adding a handheld stylesheet, or using CSS3 Media Queries, so you have full control over the final output.

It’s even taken pride of place as my favourite browser on my Windows Mobile 5.0 device!