Opera Mini v4.2 Beta Released
Yesterday, Opera released v4.2 beta of its popular Opera Mini web browser, designed for non-smartphones, but fully featured for smartphone owners, too. Opera Mini is a java-based web browser that passes traffic through its proxy in order to compress the various files coming to your phone. The result is usually a much faster browsing experience, and with less data transferred, which is good if you’re not on an unlimited data package.
New features in Opera Mini v4.2 Beta include a handful of new skins, which are basically colored themes for the browser. They have also recently opened a new server farm in the United States that will share the load with the main server, located in Oslo, Norway. Users in North America and Asia will notice significantly faster speeds, while European users should also notice a speed boost, as the load on the Oslo station is lessened.
For S60 users, another key benefit is that Opera Mini v4.2 can directly call the phone’s built-in RealPlayer for video clips. Previously, the app had to first call on the native web browser, which then called RealPlayer. Thus, you should see better performance and far less prompts for various confirmations.
You can download Opera Mini v4.2 Beta here, and note that it *can* be installed alongside the current Opera Mini, so you can have both on the same phone with no problems. Personally, I steer clear of java apps on my S60 phones, and will happily stick with the default S60 web browser.
Are you an Opera Mini user? If so, why? What features do you think set it apart?
Most noticable is if you want to choose a dropdown list whereas the S60 browser often will display this wrong.
I've already ranted a bit about getting problems with the last beta version before, whereas I had to manually remove some files resident in my c: memory before I could install the 4.1 stable version. (That was when I had fw 20.x.x on my N82 and it was hackedO
So I'm really a bit sceptical to install this new beta version.
Though I may be trying it as you can still have the official stable version along with it.
What I really like on the Opera Mini is that it chumps the websites before serving them to your mobile.
That means basically lower cost, when using 3g (unless you have a upper limit cost for datatraffic, which my operator have).
The shortcuts you can assign yourself and the speed dial is also a plus.
Opera sync is also nice (for those using Opera on a computer, not me)
However I find that some modified version of this application is even better, whereas they offer more functionalities such as management for downloads.
All in all I really don't know about the new version, but my experiences with Opera Mini have been nice (with the 1 time problem I got for installing previous beta)
Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/9.2; U; Series60/3.1 NokiaN82/30.0.019; Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 ) AppleWebKit/413 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/413
Plus, backspace works now on my E71