Opera Mini 4 Review

We love small, dont we? We like to see maximum coming out of minimum, and if we had our way, we would have liked the whole world compressed into a tiny marble. Thats Opera Mini 4, for you. This tiny piece(98KB!) of software was so overwhelming, that it made me sit up and write a review for you. You’ll appreciate it all the more, when I tell you that I have never till date done a software review. Enough crap,now lets get on with the review.

Navigation

The earlier version of Opera Mini, was a very minimalstic browser. You could just see your web pages in it in a not so eye friendly manner. Reports usually looked like scrambled eggs and you had to make do with it. It was just a bare basic browser.

Not any more, what with better cellphones with larger screens and faster internet speeds. The navigation has been totally revamped and is very much like the iPhone.(Its not so smooth, but i betcher, Safari is 10MB and this thing is 98KB.) It shows you the whole page, you navigate to the part you want, click and et voila! It shows you the page in all its full rendered glory, exactly like how it would look on your PC screen.If you have a touch screen device, you are going to have even more fun. Tap on the part you want to read and it will zoom to give you a full view. Now to show my iPhone flaunting friends a thing or two on my P1i .


One more feature I liked, was the ability to view pages in landscape mode. Just hit ”*” and “#”, turn around your device and continue with your work as if nothing happened at all.

Compression

This is one really thoughtful feature, attempted before, but bringing it to the palm is something really nice. What this essentially does is, when you request a web page, a remote server compresses all the data and sends it back to you. This saves enormous amounts of bandwidth and in turn money. Indians, who pay 1paisa per kb will know better..

It compresses images and text alike and according to Opera, the BBC website which is actually 270KB, opens up within 40kb with the images turned on in low quality. Really neat, huh?

Shortcuts


Opera Mini 4 offers a slew of shortcuts. Just hit “*” and you can access all your bookmarks and feeds from there.

Sync with My Opera

If you use Opera to browse the web on your PC and have saved all your Bookmarks on My Opera, you can sync it all to your cellphone.

What’s Hot!!

• Can be installed on most cellphones
• Really small footprint
• Fast
• Improved navigation
• Compression
• Ability to sync bookmarks with MyOpera
• Full CSS Support
• Keypad Shortcuts
• Auto resizing

Whats Not!

• No Tabbed Browsing
• No Password Management

Verdict : If you are not happy with the default browser on your phone, get this one right away! Even if you are, Opera Mini 4 sure is worth your time.

My Rating Rating 8/10

Download Opera Mini 4

Tell me what your experience was with Opera and how much would you give it on a scale of 10.

Alternatively you can read this review on my blog, SatishSays dot Com