Rating: That’s the trouble with betas
Browser specialist, Opera, released a new version of its mobile browser for Symbian/S60 handsets – the Opera Mobile 10 beta. GoMo news downloaded it and immediately ran into memory problems.
Before that, GoMo News did a bit of head-scratching. Opera says this beta is for Nokia phones and S60 handsets in particular. We tried to download it to a Nokia E61-1 and the software reported that the handset was incompatible. Very strange.
So we dug out an old Nokia N95. This time the download worked. When fired up for the first time as well as displaying the licence agreement, Opera Mobile 10 beta showed a useful list of the major features in this release.
To be fair, there doesn’t appear to be much in Opera Mobile 10 which hasn’t been seen before in Opera Mini 5. However, we were keen to test the claim that this version is twice as fast as the previous release of the previous release of Opera Mobile for Symbian.
Naturally, the first step was to add the GoMo News site to the Speed Dial page. This displays nine icons which represent your nine favourite web sites. A quick way to surf the Net.
Sadly, while the beta software was creating the icon for our Web site, it ran out of memory and suggested we close other open applications. The trouble was that no other applications were actually loaded.
The problem seems to occur when the page is larger than 1.8 Mb. But, hey, this is a beta anyway. Incidentally, it wouldn’t load one of the default Speed Dials – the BBC news site – without complaining, too.
GoMo news rather suspects that the emphasis on this release has been to add support for the new touchscreen Nokia Symbian phones.
Other features found in Mobile 10 beta include Opera Desktop favourites such as tabbed browsing and a password manager. It should also automatically go into landscape mode when you shake the handset but that didn’t work on the N95 either.
Of course, the best news is that Opera Mobile 10 beta is a free download. If you want to side load it via a PC go to http://www.opera.com/mobile/next/. Or directly onto you handset using http://m.opera.com/mobile.
Naturally we’re looking version to the full version.
“To be fair, there doesn’t appear to be much in Opera Mobile 10 which hasn’t been seen before in Opera Mini 5.”
You do realize that Opera Mobile 10 and Opera Mini 5 essentially are the same product, except for one major difference: Opera Mobile has the browser engine locally on the device, allowing e.g. client-side scripting (JavaScript), while Opera Mini has the browser engine on a server, not allowing the use of JavaScript.
I do realise that now!
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The Truth About Opera Mobile 10 Memory Usage: http://wapreview.com/blog/?p=5552
Kind of debunks this article. Blame Nokia’s crappy phones, not Opera…
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Works great on my old N95! Dunno what the moaning is about? And anyway any page over 1.8mb i would blame the Webcoder!
On my Nokia E71, I had no problem with either Opera Mobile 10 or Opera Mobile 10.1 Beta 1. However, with the final version of Opera Mobile 10.1, I am now getting plenty of out-of-memory error messages.
Same phone, the web sites to which I go didn’t get more complex, overnight. The only thing that changed is the version of Opera Mobile and the number of error messages that change precipitated.
great put up, very informative. I ponder why the other experts of this sector don’t realize this. You should proceed your writing. I’m sure, you have a great readers’ base already!