Opera updates Mini browser with touch, tabs and speed dial

Further cementing it’s position as the most popular mobile browser on the market, Opera has released version 5 of its’ Opera Mini browser. The new program is mostly concerned with adding user-interface features to make browsing easier and faster.

What’s Opera Mini?

Opera Mini is a web browser designed by Opera and geared exclusively towards mobile phones. It was first released in 2006 for Java phones – and 5 versions later it still runs on low end Java devices. Actually, it requires Java support to run at all.

The major feature of Opera Mini is called “caching”. When you view a page through Mini, you request it through the Opera server. Before it appears on your device, the page is cached with Opera where it is crunched and streamlined so that it loads quickly and smoothly even on low powered devices.

What’s new?

Of most interest to the smartphone crowd will be a major touch screen update. Opera Mini 5 now comes with support for both keypad and touch screen browsing.

Touch interface

It now also comes with “tabbed” browsing, so that you can have multiple pages open at the same time. You can open the tab browser on the bottom of the screen, and quickly hop to another page:

Tabbed browsing

Then there’s “speed dial” function. This was first introduced in an earlier version of the full on-line Opera browser, and has since made it’s way to Safari. It is simply a page that displays thumbnails of nine different websites. You can either set it to display the sites you visit most often, or set them to show whatever websites you choose:

Speed dial

Opera Mini now also has a password manager, so that you can choose for the browser to remember your passwords for you as you hop from gmail to flickr. Of course, that makes it even more imperative that you don’t lose your phone.

What we think?

Opera has been releasing versions of Mini since 2006, and they’ve stayed abreast of developing mobile technologies all along the way. As a result, there are no real changes beneath the surface for Mini 5 – there are some tweaks to improve performance, but nothing major. For example, Flash support still hasn’t been added. However, Mini is still one of the fastest and smoothest mobile browsing experiences around… and given that it’s free download and comes in at under a quarter of a one megabyte, it’s probably the best value as well.