Opera recently released Opera Mini 3.0.1, a tiny web browser for your cell phone. You phone needs to support Java (don’t be surprised, many phones do) and needs to have data support in order for Opera to stand a chance of working.

It looks gorgeous on my Sony-Ericsson S710a… the S710a has a large screen and Opera takes good advantage of it. Even my older Sony-Ericsson T616 can run it.

Opera Mini is very small, too… the download for my phone was only 98Kbytes. How do they get it so small? By pre-processing the data… when Opera Mini makes a request, it talks to Opera’s servers, not directly to the website. Opera’s servers then pre-crunch the data for your phone, making Opera Mini’s job much simpler.

How do you get Opera Mini on your cell phone? One of three ways:

1. If your phone supports Bluetooth or you can upload files to it via a USB cable, you can download Opera Mini to your computer and manually transfer it to your cell phone. Just copy the file over and your phone will do the rest.

2. If your phone supports WAP, you can navigate to a WAP page and download Opera Mini from there. Given how small Opera Mini is, it won’t rack up huge data charges doing the download.

3. You can send a text message to your phone from Opera Mini’s web site. The text message will contain a link for you to use to download Opera Mini directly.

Start at http://www.operamini.com/ in any event.

Then when you want to use Opera Mini, just locate it using your phone’s user interface (it’s probably in a folder called “Applications” or something similar) and start it up.

For a 98Kb web browser, Opera Mini is surprisingly full-featured, with support for RSS feeds, uploading photos (obviously your phone needs a camera to do this), secure browsing, easy navigation and Opera’s trademark speed. The start page has very convenient links to Google and Wikipedia. And, something that I really appreciate is the clock in its status bar… I don’t know why Sony-Ericsson couldn’t be bothered to put a clock on any page other than the front page but it’s very helpful to be able to find out what time it is without having to exit whatever you’re doing and go back to the top level UI of your phone.

It also works with Blackberries and with Java-enabled Palm Pilots (which would be the Treo’s, the TX, the Tungsten C and T3, and the Zire 72).

What won’t it do?

At this point, don’t expect it to support Javascript or AJAX web sites (which rely heavily on Javascript). I can’t tell you what level of CSS support it offers, but it should work with normal, static non-Web 2.0 websites.

One last thing - it’s free.
[tags]opera[/tags][tags]opera mini[/tags][tags]web browser[/tags][tags]cell phone[/tags]

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