Opera Mobile – Browser for Symbian OS phones

My first review looks at an alternative browser for Symbian smartphones. If you like browsing the WWW on your cellphone like me and are unsatisfied with your standard browser then Opera Mobile could be an option.

Review conditions

We tested the latest Opera Mobile for S60 3rd edition, version 8.65. The application was installed on a Nokia N80. To connect to the Internet we used wireless LAN.

Installation

The Installation of Opera Mobile is easy as usual. You can get the browser from www.opera.com. Just download the sisx-file and install the browser from your Computer or directly from your phone. Just follow the instructions and you will find Opera in your programs.

First view

Before you see the local starting page of Opera Mobile the program informs you about the evaluation. Opera Mobile is not free. But you can test Opera Mobile for 30 days. After you continue the browser shows the local page. You can enter a Web address, search for something with Google, go to one of your Top 10 websites or use the help pages.

Main features

Opera Mobile offers a few really good and useful features.

Opera Mobile is the fastest, most secure browser available for S60

This excerpt from the official Opera Mobile website is mostly true. The browser really loads web-pages very fast (for a cellphone) and shows the progress while loading. When you are browsing Opera Mobile automatically creates your Top 10 on the local page and also saves a history of visited websites for every session. But the browser lets you delete your private data if you want to cover your tracks. Opera Mobile also supports multiple windows. With the help of the menu you can close or switch between open pages.

Of course you can set bookmarks in Opera Mobile, but the browser is able to save and show feeds too. If you select an image on a website, you can open, save or send it directly like it is shown in the second screenshot. Another gimmick of Opera Mobile is to send addresses via SMS, MMS or E-mail. And last but not least the browser also features a search-function so that it is possible to find terms on websites.So you can see that Opera Mobile supports a lot of features you are used to from your computer browser.

Handling

Opera Mobile is very much based on shortcuts. With the hash key and the numbers you can perform different actions, for example go to a new website (#1). It is possible to configure the shortcuts in the settings to meet your requirements.The default display option is fit to screen: the whole website will be rearranged to fit the size of your screen. We would recommend to disable fit to screen because it destroys almost every page layout. In the first screenshot fit to screen is enabled, in the second screenshot i turned fit to screen off.The zoom Opera Mobile offers is really great. If you think the fonts are to small or to big, just select the optimal zoom-level from 20% to 250%.For better handling, the browser saves visited websites and suggests them automatically if you want to open a new website. It recommends address pre- and suffixes (of course customisable in the settings) and you can use the password manager to save your logins.

Weaknesses

We also found a few weaknesses while testing Opera Mobile.Rendering images is sometimes very slow, especially when the zoom-level is above 150%. Changing the render mode from quality to speed reduces the time for rendering images just a little bit.On a few pages xml parsing errors occurred and as a result code was directly shown on the page. Therefore the layout and design of those pages were crippled.We were also missing a landscape mode. For the most websites this would reduce scrolling from left to right and backwards. Maybe with a Nokia N95 this would work automatically.

Conclusion

Opera Mobile offers a lot more features than the standard browser. It supports multiple windows, feeds, a detailed zoom, find in page, etc..But on the other hand Opera Mobile also has a few weaknesses the standard browser doesn’t have. For example xml parsing errors and slower image-rendering. I’d like to give Opera Mobile 4 stars because of all the useful features but due to the fact that Opera is not free my rating is 3 of 5 stars.

Tagged as: Browser, Internet, Opera Mobile