Life Without Toast - Sibling Rivalry

While reading Lifehacker yesterday, there was an announcement of the release of version 9 of the Opera browser. Whilst reading the comments on the post, some dude commented that Opera Mini for mobile was awesome, so I decided I'd give it a try and downloaded it. As it turns out, it's completely brilliant.

For a start, it's only a 96kb download, so that bit only took about five seconds. It's incredibly easy to set up, requiring you basically just to start the application and it takes care of the rest. It's Java-based, so it should work on any mobile device you can think of. The interface is very intuitive, looking for all intents and purposes like every web browser you've used on your PC, with an address bar at the top, a Google search bar below that, and it also has another search bar under that which can be used to search sites like Wikipedia (handy for those pub quiz nights!), Dictionary.com, Technorati and a few more.

What really impressed me was it's speed. Whatever the browser that was in my phone when I bought it (either a Sony or a Vodaphone one, either way it crap), it is slooooow. Opera is FAST. Seriously, it's like having broadband in your pocket. No, really! It can download this here blog in about 4 or 5 seconds. It also does really cool things like re-sizing all images on a page so they fit in your phone, and re-aligning text so it's readable within the constraints of your phone's screen. It's got a bookmarks folder too, and you can set it up so that individual bookmarks of your choosing are displayed on the 'homepage' (as in the screenshot on the right). It also stores your full history, a feature that is (shamefully) missing from most default mobile browsers.

So all in all, as a browser designed specfically for a mobile phone, I'd have to give Opera Mini a resounding 10 out of 10. It's lightweight, fast, and has no bad points at all that I've discovered. If you want to browse any website when you can't really whip out a laptop, or where there's no wireless internet, accept no substitutes.

_{incidentally, the Flickr mobile site is brilliant too!}