Opera Mini 5 on Android mini review
By Tim Stevens 
posted March 11th 2010 9:25AM
posted March 11th 2010 9:25AM
Mini 5 relies on Opera's servers to cache and compress pages for you, so what's sent to your phone is actually much smaller than what you normally would download if you were to get the entire page. It's not quite like Skyfire, where the entire page is rendered off-site, more of a hybrid where the page is still rendered locally, but using compressed text and images. The result is impressively fast page loads at the cost of reduced image quality -- though you can request it to send you higher quality pics if you're not in a hurry.
But it's not all about speed, and we're impressed by the simple UI of Opera 5. It's not groundbreakingly new or shocking compared to the earlier versions of Opera (or, indeed, any other mobile browser), but creating new tabs is quick and easy, selecting from bookmarks is about as painless as you can get, and the browser really makes great use of screen real estate. It should be no surprise that multitouch is not on offer here, so if you were hoping this would finally let you do some pinch-zooming on your Droid that's not the case, but double-tapping to get a closer look is very snappy, as is ducking back out to a wider view. Still, not everything is perfect. On the Engadget homepage some complex page elements are overlapping, and we often saw similar issues on other pages.
So, there's still some work to do (this is, of course, a beta), but the speed is so good that we won't be uninstalling this one anytime soon.
FINALLY!
ive been using android on my vogue
and ive really missed opera mini 5!
Mini 5 seems impressive but one thing I didn't like was when you scroll up and down in a website, the touch is too sensitive and any changes horizontally will be detected and you'll end up going slightly to the left or the right. In Mini 4, it is locked to vertical scrolling and any left/right scrolling would require a lot of finger movement - which is a good thing, especially when viewing comments on a site like engadget.com
Is there anyway to change this in Mini 5?
Opera mini simulator:
http://www.opera.com/mini/demo/
Thank you Engadget, Opera Mini definitely deserves much more attention.
Just tried it out. A great improvement over the total mess that was V4 on android. It is very fast compared to the default browser. Not sure if it is better.
Still waiting for Fennec.
I wish they would release XMarks for Android because I really don't feel like redoing bookmarks.
I am excited that now I can seamlessly move from my laptop to my DROID to my desktop and continue browsing right where I left off thanks to Opera sync.
How is it that an Engadget writer does not know that Dolphin browser has enabled pinch-zoom on Droid since day 1?
im assuming this will do wonders for battery life
since all it does is render images as opposed to the whole site
especially since it keeps a couple pages on memory
so when you back it doesnt reload the whole page again
tried it out today. very good for a beta. it makes EDGE feel faster than 3G.
in other words, opera mini 5 feels faster on EDGE than the stock browser on 3G
This thing is lightning-fast!!!
It's too simple but it's a beta what else can we expect.