Opera Mobile for Android: First impressions
Opera Mini arrived on Android towards the middle of this year.
While most Android users appreciated the support for their platform, their resonant cry was “But why Mini and not Mobile?”
Then last month Opera promised Android users that Opera Mobile would be in Android Market around mid-November.
As of yesterday morning Android users could download the beta of Opera Mobile 10.1 from the Android Market for free.
Opera kindly let us test a build of Opera Mobile for Android prior to its public launch today, so hopefully we can answer some of the questions regarding what you can expect from the browser.
Opera Mobile, Opera Mini, what’s the difference?
Just looking at the technical specs of Opera’s various browsers for mobile devices seems to indicate that there isn’t much difference between Opera Mobile 10 and Mini 5.2.
You wouldn’t really be wrong drawing that conclusion either.
The key differences between the two browsers are all listed in the table on Opera’s site: Opera Mobile sports Opera’s full rendering engine and lets you turn off Opera Turbo.
Full rendering engine support means that Opera Mobile has support for the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) standard, certain CSS3 features and fast JavaScript. These are provided by Opera’s Vega vector graphics library as well as as Carakan project.
Opera Turbo is a system where web pages requested from a device are first sent to Opera’s servers and compressed before being delivered to the device. In Opera Mini this behaviour can’t be turned off.
Opera Mobile tested
While the differences between Opera Mini and Mobile remain minimal, having the whole Opera renderer available on Android is something fans of both the Android platform and Opera browser have requested.
As users of Opera’s browsers have come to expect, Opera Mobile has multi-tabbed browsing, Opera Link and Speed Dial.
The browser’s tabs are represented similarly to those in Opera Mini: A series of slides made visible by tapping a button on the bottom bar of the browser. Even with ten or so tabs open it’s surprisingly easy to navigate between tabs.
While I didn’t accidentally select a tab I didn’t intend to even with 15 tabs open, it becomes basically impossible to see what’s open on a particular tab when more than 10 tabs are open at a time.
You are able to navigate between tabs by sliding across the tab “bar.” This can be especially useful when you have a large number of tabs open, though there are one or two niggles that manifest when dragging quickly across a large number of tabs. The issue seems to be purely a cosmetic one, however.
Opera Link seems to work as advertised, synchronising custom searches as well as your speed dial.
The browser behaves a little strangely when changing the orientation of the device. As expected browsing switches to landscape mode, but the browser’s canvas goes blank for a second or two before redrawing the website. It doesn’t seem to reload the site, though.
At first it also seemed a little strange to find that the Android menu button doesn’t do anything. As in Opera Mini the browser’s menu is accessed from a wrench icon on the bottom button bar.
However, when turning on full screen browsing the button bar disappears and can then be accessed by pressing the Android menu button.
Smooth zooming and scrolling
Saving the best for last, the most impressive feature by far is Opera Mobile’s zooming and scrolling.
While I may not much like iPhone, one must concede that the user interface of Apple’s smartphone is unparalleled in its smoothness and responsiveness.
Opera Mobile offers scrolling and pinch-to-zoom responsiveness on the order what you would expect from an iPhone. The only complaint is that text and images aren’t instantaneously sharpened when zooming in – it takes a second or so for the rendered to compensate for the new zoom level.
Minimum system requirements and review hardware
The official word is that Opera Mobile will run on Android 1.5 “Cupcake” and newer, but our tests were conducted on an HTC Desire running Android 2.1 “Éclair.”
Your mileage my vary on lower spec Android devices.
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