opera mini: eu recomendo e... ele tambem

4/1/2007 07:00

estou usando o opera mini no meu nokia e hoje vi esse review sobre o
opera em treos: la vai o copy-paste do www.pda247.com

It’s generally acknowledged amongst the Treo user fraternity that
Blazer is a pretty awful browser. Slow; no caching of previously
visited pages meaning a full reload each time you want to go back to a
page you’ve recently left; clunky management of favourites and
predilection to crashes are just some of its various faults.

So what are the alternatives? Well one choice is the freely
downloadable Opera Mini (http://www.operamini.com/). This baby cousin
of the desktop Opera browser is a Java ME browser for mobile devices,
which runs on most phones that support Java including the Treo series.

Unlike normal web browsers, Opera Mini fetches all content through a
proxy that runs the layout engine of the Opera desktop browser. The
engine on the proxy server reformats pages to be suitable for small
screens, using Opera's Small Screen Rendering. The content is
compressed, then delivered to the phone in a markup language called
OBML (Opera Binary Markup Language). When the content reaches the
phone it has been reduced in size by typically 70-90%, theoretically
making browsing a quicker experience than Blazer can manage.

In practice, installing it and getting it to work on the Treo required
some fiddling – two components are required. The Opera software
itself, and if you haven’t already got it installed on your phone/PDA,
the Java software and links to these are available from the Opera Mini
web site. Once installed, I found that some further tweaking of the
Java settings (via Preferences/IBM Java VM) were required to make the
software stable – otherwise it will crash on you. Reading through some
of the Forum postings on the Opera Mini site it’s recommended for Palm
devices that the options for Double Buffering are ticked, the “Set
Memory Maximum” is set to 1MB and the “Java Thread Stack Size” set at
32kb, although in practice you may need to adjust these slightly
differently on your individual machine. Mine were set as above.

So, how does it work in the real world?

It looks sleeker than Blazer, but that’s a subjective view, possibly
borne from the view that generally Blazer is pretty horrible, so
anything’s an improvement.

Opera Mini has a minimal interface, and only includes the most
essential features for web browsing, such as bookmarks, history and
back controls. The quality of images can be set to low or high
resolution, where high setting approximately doubles the size of the
images downloaded. It also has capabilities such as smooth scrolling,
skins, and dual font sizes.

Every time you start Opera Mini it asks if it can “use airtime to send
or receive an http connection until Opera Mini terminates?” I guess
the thinking here is that it would like to avoid anyone being
surprised by any connection charges that they might accrue while using
Opera Mini. Unfortunately there’s no box to say “Yes always” option
so you have to agree to this every time Opera Mini starts which is a
bit annoying.

Immediately noticable is that there’s no Treo 5 way navigation button
support for the screen menu options “Menu” and “Back” (bizarrely
there’s no “Home” or “Forward” menu options either). If you want to
access the menu, unless I’m missing soemthing obvious, it’s the
stylus, your finger or nothing. However this may be to do with how
Java works, which to be honest is far too technical for me to
understand.

Also, there’s no apparent way that I’ve found so far to disconnect
your session from within Opera Mini. You have to exit Opera and then
either have to diconnect through Preferences/Network, or go into
Versamail or Blazer, which rather defeats the object of replacing
Blazer somewhat, so that’s a bit disappointing.

On the plus side, pressing “Up” or “Down” on the central navigator key
works as in Blazer moving you to or from the next link in descendong
order sown the page. Even better, pressing “Left” or “Right” scrolls
you smoothly up or down a whole page at a time allowing you to quickly
flcik through a long page. My early efforts with Opera Mini suggest
that it does load pages quite a bit faster than Blazer, and the
ability to have and use a workable “Back” button (albeit with my
finger) and have previously visited pages instantly available is a big
plus over the Treo’s default offering.

Rendering/formatting of pages is as pretty decent as could be expected
for the small but perfectly formed Treo screen.

Opera Mini comes with some bookmarks already in place, and allows you
as you would expect to add more. Irritatingly however, I’ve yet to
find a way to add a bookark for the current page you’re visting. You
have to choose Menu/Bookmarks/Manage/Add and then add the details from
scratch. In the same vein, you can’t customise a home page. The
default start page is set to display a blank address field, a Google
search fields and one of a customisable list of links.

Stability is pretty good, although its not as rock solid as one would
hope. It’s locked up on me a couple of times in about 4 weeks use, but
maybe that’s because I haven’t got my settings quite right yet.

So, overally impressions? I like it. On balance, it the brwosing
experience is better than Blazer but the inability to have menu
navigation via buttons, including the ability to disconnect from
within the application are niggling issues that detract from the
overall experience."

abracos,

rene mailto:rene@usina.com