Opera Mini 4 taking on iPhone Safari Browser?

by Vincent Nguyen on June 19, 2007





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Opera Mini 4 taking on iPhone Safari Browser?Those who won’t be buying the iPhone will have many reasons to switch from their current mobile browsers to the Opera Mini 4 beta. However, it is unlikely Opera’s Mini 4 will ever beat out Safari on the iPhone. Despite having new features like overview mode, zooms in to focus on content (similar to Opera’s Wii browser), dynamically change size of text and images and virtual mouse to make it easy to scroll in any direction.

I tested Opera’s Mini 4 beta on the HTC Touch. While I find it pretty nifty, it didn’t render and format pages too nicely. Google Reader loads but does not work at all. Perhaps it’s the Touch or something else preventing me to get the “virtual mouse” working. The browser seems to disable Touch’s onscreen scrolling functionality and none of the advertised features seem to work. Perhaps Opera Mini 4 beta does not support Windows Mobile 6 and/or the HTC Touch yet? Click over to view screen shots.

Opera Mini 4 taking on iPhone Safari Browser?

Opera Mini 4 taking on iPhone Safari Browser?

Opera Mini 4 taking on iPhone Safari Browser?
Does not render Google Reader at all.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=854225394101675444

The geeky video above is a complete bash of the iPhone for being too expensive, and that Opera is free and online with any phone in the world. Well, I know of one phone that Opera isn’t on --- the iPhone. So take that.

Opera Product Page

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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }

1 asj 06.19.07 at 4:19 pm

There are ZERO iPhone Safari users right now…there are 15 million Opera Mini users. It’s the most popular mobile browser in the world by far, and the safari ain’t gonna change that. Opera Mini debuted only late last year and the changes and improvements have been nothing but amazing. Remember, that safari browser will be running on ONE phone type with a lot of memory - the producers of Opera Mobile had to design it for literally legions of devices, from Windows Mobile with lots of memory to feature phones with barely any memory at all - KUDOS to their hard work and great job!

2 Val 06.19.07 at 7:08 pm

Your screenshots looks suspiciously like Opera Mini 3.1. In fact, the RSS support is currently disabled in Opera Mini 4 beta, so it can’t be that. Make sure that you download it from mini.opera.com/beta/ with your wap browser.

:-)

3 Vincent Nguyen 06.19.07 at 7:43 pm

[quote comment="3891"]Your screenshots looks suspiciously like Opera Mini 3.1. In fact, the RSS support is currently disabled in Opera Mini 4 beta, so it can’t be that. Make sure that you download it from mini.opera.com/beta/ with your wap browser.

:-)[/quote]

You’re right - it is 3.1x. When I visit mini.opera.com/beta/ - this is the screen that greets me:

Opera Mini Error

4 asj 06.19.07 at 11:11 pm

I figure I’ll take potshots at the safari too ;-)

http://weblogs.java.net/blog/asj2006/archive/2007/06/my_ode_to_opera.html

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