Opera Mobile 10.1 Released In Android Market

[rajanmehta 4,056]

Opera has just released the Opera Mobile browser on the Android Market. Until now if you wanted Opera on your Android handset then you would have had to settle for the Opera Mini, which is great for low powered handsets, but too much of a compromise on powerful smartphones. Opera Mobile is a full-fledged browser that you can use if for some reason you have a problem with the built-in Android browser.

The browser looks exactly like other Opera Mobile browsers. The features and options are also the same as before except for one addition; you can now specify the behavior of the text wrap mode. You can now make it work only when you tap on the display to zoom and not if you pinch to zoom. Or you can have it work in both situations or disable it completely.

Pinch to zoom is supported in Opera Mobile now, which wasn't the case with Opera Mobile. In Opera Mini you can pinch to zoom but it would only zoom to a preset level and there was no fine control over the amount of zoom you want to dial in.

Opera Mobile is a very fast browser. When tested on a Garmin-Asus A10 running Android 2.1, Opera Mobile was consistently faster than the built-in browser. However, when we tried to do the same on an HTC Desire running Android 2.2, the speeds were on par with those of the built-in browser with Flash disabled. When you enable Opera Turbo then page loading speed increases even further and becomes almost twice as fast, although the image quality goes for a toss.

Scrolling was super smooth on Opera Mobile. However, there is still one minor issue with it; the browser does not keep the focus on the text when you scroll. On the Mobile Safari, for example, when you scroll the browser keeps the focus on the text even if you swipe the finger slightly across instead of perfectly vertically. It's only when you deliberately scroll sideways does the browser unlock itself from the text, but then if you happen to scroll sideways again it will latch on to the text to keep it in focus again.

This way you don't have to worry about swiping very accurately when reading as the browser disregards minor scrolling errors and keeps the focus on the text. This happens to some extent on the built-in Android browser as well but not on Opera Mobile where even a tiny cross scroll can make the browser lose focus from the text and scroll in the direction of the finger.

The new tap-only text wrap mode is a nice feature. This way I can choose when I want the browser to adjust the text to the screen on the fly without having to dig into the settings every time. At times text wrap can mess with the page layout considerably, so it is nice to not have it on all the time.

We did come across some page rendering issues that have always plagued Opera browsers. The WebKit browsers on Android and iOS do a better job of accurately rendering almost every page you throw at them, but the Presto engine on the Opera Mobile does screw up occasionally. This has been our biggest grouse with the desktop browser as well. We also noticed that Opera Mobile uses a different font from the Droid Sans that Android uses. And it uses the font for all the pages, regardless of what font the website is using.

The new Opera Mobile has geolocation support as well, so you can now geotag your tweets when you tweet from Opera Mobile on Twitter.com. It also adds support for scalable vector graphics.

Overall the Opera Mobile 10.1 beta for Android is a really nice browser. Unfortunately it is launching on a platform that already has a very capable browser built-in, unlike Symbian for example, where the built-in browser is quite poor. Then again, it is a free download, so there is nothing stopping you from installing it and giving it a try.

Source: Techtree

[tanveer 59]

installing now. Thanks

[_Kailash_ 63]

Installed ..and Just Loving It

Thanks