It is finally here, I’m not teasing you, the beta of Opera Mini 4 (Dimension) is available right now! Congratulations to the Opera Team, I love your little iPhone ad parody.
Point your browser to http://mini.opera.com:
Opera couldn’t detect my Nokia E61i, but I know I have enough horsepower under this stainless steel body that I selected the high memory version:
Depending on your phone you will be asked to confirm the download, hit yes as many times as necessary:
Check out the icon in the lower right hand corner. Opera has just unleashed Pandora’s box onto the mobile browsing world. Full review after the break, trust me, you’ll want to read it:
Opera Mini starts by asking you to test your network connection:
This process takes a while, about 20-30 seconds. You only have to do it once so don’t worry about it:
Once that is over you’re presented with a summary of all the new features and the EULA:
This is not a feature complete beta, which usually I would wave my finger at, but this browser more than makes up for it. What does the start page look like?
Nice and clean, in Opera Mini 3 you were able to select what search engine you could use, I hope they bring that back. This is what hitting the menu key brings up:
Not a lot under tools either:
Here are the setting you can actually configure:
What does intomobile.com look like on this thing? I’m glad you asked:
Just hit center button on whatever device you may have and it just zooms right inside that little box:
If you prefer the old school Opera Mini 3 style of a single column you can turn that on by just hitting 1 on your keypad, this menu pops up:
Click OK and this is what it now looks like:
Steve Jobs loves to show off The NY Times on the iPhone, here is how it looks like in Opera Mini:
While most phones don’t have the capability of being poked, you can always hit a button to zoom:
That concludes the copious amounts of screenshots portion of this review, what do I actually think about this browser? It needs to be installed on every single Java enabled device out there. The reason I now use a smartphone with a large screen is because Opera Mini 2.0 made browsing on my old busted up Nokia possible. Once you install this application you will want your next mobile phone to have a higher resolution screen than the one before it. Do you understand why I’m sick and tired of QVGA now?
Opera Mini uses a proxy server to compress the internet for you, this is the only reason I use it on a daily basis rather than the browser built into my S60 device.
Motorola, Samsung, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, LG, whatever phone you have is now insignificant. The full internet is in the palm of your hand thanks to Opera. For those of you without a dataplan you may not realize just how powerful it is to have the entire world in your hand. T-Mobile customers, just dial 611 and ask for T-Zones, it is less than $10/month and you get unlimited internet capabilities on your mobile. AT&T customers, dial 611 and ask for MediaNet which is $20/month last time I checked. International customers, if you are paying by the KB you have just found an application that is gold.
This is a beta and I’m going to treat it as such. Opera Mini 3.0 had themes (different colors), a very capable RSS reader and the ability to choose my search engine on the start page; I want those back. Performance is outstanding, the application definitely starts up faster than Opera Mini 3.0 ever did, the websites also render quicker.
I can’t emphasize this enough, stop living in the internet your operator lets you play in, just install this beta and enjoy the world wide web the way it was meant to be enjoyed.