With 30 million smiling faces, Opera delivers yet again. It unveiled its fifth generation of Opera Mini.
Facing stiff competition from Mozilla’s Fennec and the Skyfire recently , Opera did a fine job in putting up a rich featured and beautified marvel. Trying its best to meet the demands and expectations one can surely say that Opera has brought out its graphically enriched, attractive and much advanced browser.
Opera Mini 5.0 has has been imparted many features from its desktop counterpart Opera 10. Unlike its predecessor it has Speed dial, a grid of nine thumbnail images, which is a replacement to Mini 4.2’s list of links. It has introduced a much demanded tabbed browsing interface. Though its not the first one to have this feature but surely the lightest one to do so. The fact that the browser like Fennec, Skyfire and even Opera Mobile are too heavy for some mobile phones, Mini 5.0 comes as boon with so many features. Plus the bonus being its Java platform which opens it endlessly for almost all platform.
The glossy black interface has come with number of overhauls. Firstly the need of opening of a new window with every click onto an input field has been removed and one can directly type in the input boxes. The navigation menu has improved a lot from its previous versions.
One of the most important feature of this browser is it being light weight. Unlike other browsers which i have used earlier performed poorly under low processing conditions. The tabbed features often led to an error ‘low in memory’. But it being light gives us very little trouble in this regards.
Another life saver from opera is the password manager. It does what is expected out of it and delivers its best. Apart from the ones mentioned above the whole action pack of Mini 4.2 is still available. more
What’s missing?
Opera shook out some of its nagging features like skin and the ability to create a new search engine from any Web site. Another important feature which is missing is Opera Link ( Opera’s service for syncing bookmarks and Speed Dial between your various browsers, like desktop and mobile) . Though it is mentioned in one of its developer’s blog that its not there because the recent release is a Beta release.
Still no hopes for video playback on Mini 5.0. Mini still lacks this ability as the flash plug-ins are disabled in the browser. You might be able to play videos from www.youtube.com but those don’t come directly from the standard youtube.com.
In spite of its drawbacks Opera Mini 5.0 packs enough punch to be acclaimed as a worthy upgrade to Mini 4.2.
You can download Opera Mini 5 beta for free from http://m.opera.com/next. Multiple versions are available for Black-berry and for other Java based mobile phones.