Opera Mobile 9.5 announced - But whats the big deal

Opera has announced the latest version of their Opera Mobile.

You can watch this guided tour of the Opera Mobile 9.5 user interface and features.

Now, most of you who have been using Opera browser on your phone should be confused between Opera Mini and Opera Mobile.

Opera Mini and Opera Mobile are different in many aspects. If you have been using Opera on your phone for a long time now, then you should be having Opera Mini.

Opera Mini is java based browser application, whereas Opera Mobile is written as a native application for a Symbian S60 or Windows Mobile operating system (Opera Mobile 9.5 also seems to be available for embedded linux).

An other difference is that Opera Mini uses an intermediate proxy server which converts the web pages to much lower sizes. Opera Mobile on the other hand directly downloads the web pages onto the mobile and then figures out a way to render it on the screen.

Last, but not the least.. Opera Mini is free, whereas, one needs to buy Opera Mobile.

Now, is it worth buying a browser for your phone. May be and May be not. I don't want to comment on it unless and until I try out the 30-day trial version of their previous version of Opera Mobile.

Opera Watch: Change in my perspective of Opera

I have been using Opera for quite sometime and that too on and off. My closeness to Opera probably grew with the use of Opera Mini. My only impression of Opera was that it was dormant or rather a sleepy organization and that they were probably struggling to keep themselves alive (Of course, this was my stupid assumption)

But only after visiting Daniel Goldman's blog on Opera did I realize that there is different world out there where lot of stuff is happening at Opera ,where they attend exhibitions showcasing their products, all of C*O's taking part in it and its CEO is actually a cool guy spending some time with the Opera fans. And of course not to mention the wealth of activity happening at the products end - Opera, Opera Mini, Opera Mobile, etc..

Visiting Opera Watch definitely has given a totally different perspective of Opera. Guys at Opera, I guess you need to promote yourself (market your brand name) so that lot of other folks who think Opera as a boring organization know that lot of things are actually happening.

By the way, nice blog Daniel and please keep posting us with great news on Opera. :)

And hey, thanks giving me some tips too :) And hey, your other suggestion on adding other search engines din't work for me.

Mobile web is not all that bad

There was this post from Scott Karp on why Mobile Web sucks for him. I could hardly agree with what he had to say and I really wanted to post this message as a reply to that. I guess lot of others would also disagree the fact that Mobile web is bad and Russel Beattie's post expresses his opposition to the fact that Mobile web browsing sucks (well.. Ahmm.. good post Russ.. except that my ears are bleeding with so many f*** :))

I think mobile surfing (and mobile computing in general) is really picking up recently. As Russ has pointed out, lot of popular web services have started providing an alternate web link which serves mobile-optimized web pages which start with http://m.theirdomainname.com/ (well not necessarily all follow the same format. For example, Techmeme's mobile site has this URL http://www.techmeme.com/mini ). But for web sites who don't provide mobile versions of their web pages there are going to lose out on a huge number of users who browse from mobile devices. As I had mentioned earlier, the are vastly underestimating the need for a mobile optimized web site.

I know lot of us have trouble finding web services which are optimized for mobile browsing. I had the same frustration trying to figure out such mobile web pages. That's the reason why I am maintaining a list of web sites which are optimized for mobile browsing. I have been updating this list as and when I find newer web sites.

Coming to Scott's complain that mobile browsing is slow, I agree with that, but its not really that bad. There are ways to circumvent this. Just like Russ, I too use Opera Mini beta for browsing on my Nokia E61. One thing that Opera does intelligently is that it does not download the web pages to the phone as it it. The web pages are first fetched into the Opera proxy severs and then they are optimized and reduced in size (to a factor of 70-90% approximately) and then pushed on to your phone. So the browsing experience (fetching and rendering them on the phone) is very fast.

Mobile Computing is the future and the whole world is slowly moving towards it. I know there are problems with mobile computing but I am sure these are being addresses as you read this.

Opera's problem with Creating a new post in blogger

Whenever I am at my in-laws place, I use Opera as my preferred browser. One reason for me to use Opera is because this is shared PC being used by my sis-in-law, my wife and myself. Usually, we all login into one of our numerous accounts such google, yahoo, etc. and logout so that next time one us uses the PC he/she can login. I found this to be a pain and hence wanted to use a different browser which would be used only by myself and there would be no problem of logging out. If not IE, then my next obvious choice would be FireFox. But I really wanted to try to something different from IE and Firefox and hence my next obvious choice was Opera.

I have been ignoring Opera for quite sometime. I remember those days (many years back) when Opera was a commercial browser and then how Opera changed their business model to have ad-enabled browser and finally ended up providing a truly free browser. Opera has its own group of dedicated followers (though not many). Well, when I went to the opera website to look at the latest features of Opera, I was surprised to see how advanced it was compared to IE or FireFox. I am planning to have a dedicated post comparing the features of Opera with that of IE and FireFox in Digitally Smart. Some of the most notable features are the tab-preview feature and the speed-dial functionality.

But there is this slight problem that I've been facing with Opera. When creating a new post in blogger.com, I am having a problem wherein when you are typing a really long line, the text never wraps up and also when it does wrap up, it leaves only a few words in the first line and rest of the words end up being in next line. The problem is kind of intermittent and pops up very often.

I was trying to get a screenshot of what I meant, but I am unable to reproduce the problem again. I will get a screenshot the next time I see this problem. But it would be great if these small problems are fixed. Got to check if there is a Opera user forum when I can report this.. for now I got to run to office..

Below is the Opera version information.

Version information:
Version - 9.23
Build - 8808
Platform - Win32
System - Windows XP
Java - Sun Java Runtime Environment version 1.4
XHTML+Voice- Plug-in not loaded