Opera Releases Mini 5 and Mobile 10, We Go Hands-on

Norway and Finland may share just over 700 km of land border, but they go a long way when it comes to bringing the best mobile experience for netizens on the move. While the Finnish giant Nokia keeps churning out gems like our very own Nokia 5800s every now and then, Norwegian Opera has taken the mobile web browsing experience to an all new level. After months of beta testing of Opera Mobile 10 and Opera Mini 5, Opera have finally released the final version of the two browsers to public usage.

We know our readers get all excited everytime there is an update from Opera for either of their browsers, so we won’t waste much time and dive into the browsers straight away, catch it after the break though.

Opera Mini 5

The java based Opera Mini 5 is the poorer cousin of the two in the sense that this version of the browser is available across a wide gamut of devices supporting java based applications but the functionality is not compromised whatsoever. This makes it the best browser for the devices not having the luxury of higher clock speed and RAM requirements of that of the more demanding browsers.

As seen in the beta versions, Opera is maintaining the same UI across its browsers and the password manager makes a comeback in the final version of the mini 5. Well, let’s first list the complete changelog for the final version of mini 5 (from Opera Mini forum):

Key new features:

• Tabbed browsing
• A visual Speed Dial
• Opera Mini now remembers your passwords
• A new, easy to use interface, optimized for both touch and keypad phones
• A download manager
• Opera Link, to keep you synchronized

Key changes from beta 2:

• Even more languages!
• A Russian virtual keyboard for touch phones
• Improved performance on low memory devices
• Lots of little bug fixes

Known issues:

• Opera Mini 5 is recommended for devices with a QVGA or higher display resolution (320 x 240)
• Devices with low memory will struggle with tabbed browsing
• No compatibility between saved pages in Opera Mini 4 and 5

After playing around with the browser for around 2 days now, we can say that the browser is relatively bug free and though its a tad slower than its big brother Opera Mobile 10, its faster than the most mobile browsers in market today, thanks to Opera’s legendary data compression technology.

Opera Mobile 10-

Now coming to the big boy, Opera Mobile 10, we should say that it just blows our mind away! Save for the absence of flash on this browser, we would have definitely crowned this the best browser for the 5800s but we just feel the web is not the same sans the Flash and that’s keeping us from snatching the crown from Skyfire. Nevertheless the speed of browsing and smooth transitions between different tabs, gives it a higher score over the competition. Further, the  “select text” and “copy”/”search” buttons are what we love the most of this browser, which just makes our mobile browsing experience so much more intuitive: a long press and the “select text” button appears, select the text and then “copy”/”search”button appears. Why didn’t anyone else think of that?

We are still on the lookout for the official changelog for Opera Mobile 10, but it continues to elude us, but it in its absence, let’s see what the folks at Opera have to say about their best mobile browser to date:

So how do the browsers compare with each other and to the competition? Needless to say Opera Mobile 10 is faster than Opera Mini 5 and we also saw a weird security check on Opera Mini 5, which asked us to key in random numbers from the non-existent keypad of our 5800s, but we managed to clear the security check by just tapping on the pop-up window.

Coming to the competition, Skyfire has really set high standards here with flash support and synchronisation with Facebook/Twitter along with bookmark sync. Opera Link does also synchronize your bookmarks across all the opera browsers, which comes in very handy if you happen to use the desktop version of Opera but we are still not convinced Opera Mobile 10 has what it takes to topple Skyfire from the top spot, atleast till the give Flash support on the symbian platform (Opera Mobile 10 on Windows boasts of Flash support). But the speed and tabbed browsing makes this ideal for non-flash based websites and we definitely recommend having Opera Mobile 10 on our 5800 while you can skip Opera Mini 5.

Both the browsers can be downloaded for free from m.opera.com (mobile browsers) and opera.com/mobile/download/ (desktop browsers).