Opera Mini 5.1 goes native on Nokia S60
Beta browser taps cut-and-paste, email
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Opera has beta-ed a native Symbian incarnation of its low-bandwidth Opera Mini browser. Previously, Opera Mini for Symbian was a Java app.
The Norwegian browser maker says its native Opera Mini 5.1 beta offers better start-up times and better page-load and scrolling performance, "especially on older devices." It also taps straight into the Nokia S60's native copy and paste and its native email client.
According to Opera, the browser can now run on 3,000 different phone models.
Opera Mini taps into Opera proxy servers that intercept and compress webpages before sending them down to phones. This speeds download times, making the browser suitable for slower web connections and smaller amounts of memory.
It also means that Mini doesn't interpret code, so you can now find it in the Apple App Store as well. And a stable native version of Mini 5.1 can be found in the Android app market as well.
You can download the Opera Mini 5.1 for Symbian beta here. ®
COMMENTS
I'll be the 5th S60 user then, by your count
Oh, and I'm under the age of 70, too.
I use my S60, erm Symbian Platform devices (I currently have a Nokia N73 that's still going strong) heavily for Web browsing, listening to music - and Scrobbling it to my last.fm profile, reading PDFs, taking photos, and as an alarm clock (with an older version of Alarm Manager to resolve the "can't have multiple alarms, or recurring alarms" issue). I also sometimes play games, plus I've dabbled with Python for S60 and the Mobile Web Server tech demo.
Did I mention that they're also really great phones in terms of audio quality (for both calls and multimedia), and have sane antenna designs so that they're capable of actually maintaining network connectivity - even if you hold them in an unusual manner (unlike one of Apple's recent toys).
As someone who's owned a Sony Ericsson dumbphone, I can say that although they have some nice gimmicks (e.g. support for geotagging photos via A-GPS, a Bluetooth remote control feature, and USB Ethernet emulation/bridging), and last for weeks on two charges, their UI makes me want to throw them against a wall occasionally.
As for this Opera Mini beta, it feels significantly faster than the J2ME version, and being able to use the native input mechanism for entering non-alphanumeric characters is a nice bonus.
Disclaimer: I happen to be a Symbian Platform developer and SF community member in my spare time (when I'm not studying at university), although this is entirely my own opinion.
I'm only 64
If Nokia could capture the 50+ market I expect they would be very happy. It's an ageing population if you've not noticed. My E Series has real keys and while I use it mostly for voice and mail I do have the occasional app, mostly for specific news (Bloomberg, F1 app, ..). I will happily point out it supports VoIP out of the box (I'm on SIPgate, what SIP provider do you use?). I would consider an Android based handset if it came in a candy bar format with real keys (T9 is enough for me, I don't really need qwerty). But it has to support all of the functions I use on the E Series (GPS, wifi, integrated VoIP, voice (with noise cancelling mic), Java apps, native apps, push email, push calendar, FM -RDS radio and internet radio. And at least a three day battery life.
opera mini
is the default browser on some of their s40 phones.
opera does rock!
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