El Reg sings Opera on your mobile

Site offer The Register and Opera have teamed up to offer you, our beloved readers, an easy way to get online through their mobile phone, viz: Opera Mini, Opera's java-based mobile browser.

Opera Mini comes bundled with El Reg bookmarks for your convenience, and should provide the majority of you with a smooth and fast browsing.

Why Opera Mini?

Opera Mini™ is a fast and easy alternative to Opera's full mobile browser application, allowing users to access the full web on mobile phones that would normally be incapable of running a web browser. This includes the vast majority of today's 700 million Java-enabled phones.

Instead of requiring the phone to process web pages, it uses a remote server to pre-process the page before sending it to the phone. This makes Opera Mini perfect for phones with very low resources, or low bandwidth connections.

It's pretty good even for vanilla web pages. Reg users will note however, that Vulture Central has done some specific coding which allows us to recognise Opera Mini mobile phone browsers, and serve them an especially svelte and swift version of the page brought to you by new Reg Bloatgone™.

Ok, gimme some of that

Yes, you say, I'll have some of that. But how? Simple: just send an SMS text message saying 'GO THEREGISTER' To 85080.

In return, we will send both a WAP Push (service message) and an SMS with the back-up link for the browser embedded in the message.

The WAP push is the easier option, but it can get a bit lost on some phones. On the Motorola Razor, for example, it comes into your inbox as a 'browser message,' but on phones like the Sharp 902 it is rather more challenging to find and initiate the download.

If you do decide, therefore, to use the back-up link, you'll need to copy it into your phone's standard browser and download from there.

The SMS service is powered by Bango and we guarantee that your phone number will not be resold, abused or anything as a result of using this service. Bango are good like that, as they assured our black ops team who went round mob-handed, just to make sure.

Enough technical hocus-pocus, how much does it cost?

The SMS that you send will be charged to you at your standard network rate. The cost of the response should be covered by The Register, but if that goes wrong for some reason, due to the vagaries of networks, handsets etc, the maximum strain on your wallet for the response will be somewhere in the region of 12p.

What about support?

It's worth bearing in mind that, ultimately, this is an Opera service so any problems are most likely to be solved with Opera's help and support. Probably the best starting point for any problems is Opera's tech forum, which you can find here.

We do know that people in the UK using the '3' Network are currently likely to have problems - the walled garden approach 3 uses seems to prevent any messages getting through, so we'd advise 3 users to hold off for now and await developments.

If you're unsure about whether your phone and network will support the service, go here for the Opera Mini FAQ and look at the list of supported networks.

Anything else?

No. This plug has now officially ended. Happy surfing on Opera Mini. ®