Opera Mobile pops up on Android Opera Mobile is now available for Android, providing an alternative for Android users who are finding Opera Mini too mini and Google's pre-installed option too chocolately. The Java-based Opera Mini has been available on Android for a while, and offers a very comparable experience to the newly available Opera Mobile, though …
When using Opera Mini on my iPhone over WIFI, it's still significantly faster than mSafari. Not sure if or how Opera implements Turbo mode on their Mobile version differently (or Opera desktop version, for that matter). In any case, it'll still save you 80% money when stuck with a slow 2G/3G connection.
Looks like they need to keep tweaking the beta...nice start, though.
(Btw, are we going to have the same, tired, secret OS integration APIs just like with IE bundled with Windows 10 years ago, with Android now?? I guess we shouldn't be surprised, since Google is still blocking Opera users from Google Instant via browser-sniffing, w/o changing the UA string. SURPRISE, "openness"...!)
What's disappointing for me is that that 20MB only comes down to 13MB after hitting the magic 'Move to SD Card' button. That clocks it in as easily the biggest app on my phone (barring my love/hate relationship with the android Skype client, which regularly gets uninstalled).
Combine that with Android's slightly...err..."dubious"... low-space handling (e.g. disccarding SMSs), and it's still not pretty.
Got to admit i am a bit disappointed with this. I'm a massive Opera fan and was really looking forward to this, but its got a sort of flimsy feel to it. The rendering doesn't feel as solid as the webkit browsers.
It also doesn't seem to have that snappy, cached "back" functionality from Mini, where if you go back a page the last page renders instantly.
It feels a bit too much like Opera Mini, and where with Mini, it's forgivable because of the bandwidth savings, with Mobile it's less so.
As someone said above though, it is a beta.
As an alternative I found a fantastic browser the other day called "Charming" browser. It's part of the MIUI Rom (android re-skin) that some chinese blokes did. It's based on the android webkit browser, but the UI and tab handling are much, much better in my opinion. It also does have the "back" functionality where the last page is rendered instantly when you hit the back button.
I've found that it depends on the page - most pages I went 'back' to were already rendered; pages with scripts seemed to need to re-render, though, the more scripts the more likely. It seems solid enough, though.
There is one feature that I really miss - "open in background tab". I browse by opening a bunch of windows, then reading each one once it loads; it's a pain to open in new tab, go back to the original tab, rinse, repeat.
I'm giving it a try since space isn't a real issue for me but it's very deceptive that the download is 6.5MB but after installing it the space used is around 21MB with no cache space used. That *was* the size of the initial Firefox beta 1 apk but with Firefox beta 2 I'm sitting at 18MB with about 4.5MB of data cached. Both are still in beta and both have their plus points but so far I'm sticking with the WebKit browser since it's part of the Sense UI.
Out of the two betas I haven't used Opera enough yet but it looks good although Flash wasn't working when I browsed the BBC website. It might not be an issue to some and realistically isn't for me but it's puzzling when the WebKit browser and Android 2.2 support it. Firefox looks smooth and performs well for me (key words being "for me") but those damn sidebars are too keen to jump out when scrolling. I'd like to see normal scrolling hit a block and then require a conscious extra scroll to pop them open. Still, competition is good and as much as I dislike Opera on my computer I'll give it a fair run on my phone.
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