REVIEW: Opera’s Mini 4 Beta delivers full Internet, but could do more

Editor’s Note: Welcome to Yay or Nay, a feature for RCR Wireless News’ new weekly e-mail service, Mobile Content and Culture. Every week we’ll review a new wireless application or service from the user’s point of view, with the goal of highlighting what works and what doesn’t in the mobile content industry. If you wish to submit your application or service for review, please contact us at rcrwebhelp@crain.com.
Application: Opera Mini 4 Beta from Opera Software
Running on: Sprint Nextel’s CDMA network using Motorola’s Razr and LG’s Fusic
Yay: Opera Mini delivers the full Internet to a regular cellphone. Enough said.
Nay: Opera’s reliance on Yahoo’s OneSearch leaves something to be desired. And where are the maps!?!?
We Say: Despite a few slight drawbacks, this is simply the most usable, useful application for cellphones today. Plus, it’s free.
For those interested in accessing Internet sites from a cellphone, Opera Mini is a must have. In fact, it is so useful that I consider it one of the best reasons to sign up for a wireless data plan (which makes it all the more baffling that only few carriers openly promote Opera Mini to their subscribers). Simply put, Opera Mini lifts regular, Java-capable cellphones out of the maddening, restrictive and ultimately unsatisfying world of WAP and into the Internet world-no strings attached.
Granted, Opera Mini can’t do everything-Flash animation, JavaScript and any kind of video remains outside its purview-but online text and pictures are yours for the viewing thanks to Opera Mini.
And just last week, Opera released its fourth version of Mini for users’ testing. Opera Mini 4 Beta includes a number of useful additions to the Mini platform, including a zooming feature that puts Mini on par with the browsers on most high-powered smartphones.
The new zooming feature is built on top of Opera’s HTML-rendering platform. Essentially, the zooming feature presents you with an image of a full Web page and allows you to click on the section you want to read. Once selected, the view zooms in on the text or pictures you want to look at. The nice thing about this setup is that the page’s content is rendered in screen-sized columns, so once you zoom in on a section of the page, you won’t have to scroll back and forth to read text or look at a picture. To move to another part of the page you can either scroll around whiled zoomed in, or you can snap back to the full-page view and move the cursor onto another section.
After a little tinkering, I found the zooming feature to be quite helpful in moving around Web pages. The only caveat is that, in most cases, you’ll need to be familiar with the Web page you’re viewing in order to know where to go; since the image is so small, the full-page view through Opera Mini gives you only a vague sense of where things are.
Thankfully, Opera’s small-screen rendering technology-which formed the basis for the previous iterations of Mini-is still available in Opera Mini 4 Beta. The technology essentially scales down Web pages into a series of long columns, and you can scroll down the columns pretty quickly by pressing the right or left directional buttons. The zooming feature simply gives you a little more control over where you can go, and you can quickly switch between the two approaches.
So, yes, I think Opera Mini 4 Beta’s Web-browsing capabilities are extremely useful. However, I was less-than-enthused with Yahoo’s OneSearch feature, which is built into Opera Mini’s home page. Yahoo’s OneSearch is supposed to combine local business searches, Web searches, image searches, product searches and more, but I found it to be overly complicated. The problem, as far as I could tell, is that you first have to enter a search term, and then scroll through the varied results to find what you are looking for. A better approach, in my opinion, would be to specify whether you are searching for a local pizza restaurant or a photo of a pizza before you conduct a search, thereby returning only the results you want.
Another feature sorely lacking in the start page for Mini 4 Beta is a drop-down list of search engines, a feature that is available on the previous version of Mini. This feature allows you to choose from among a number of sources, including Dictionary.com, Wikipedia, eBay and more, and conduct searches using only those engines. Opera has said it plans to add additional features to its Mini 4 Beta, and hopefully this will be one.
Finally, my primary gripe with Opera’s Mini 4 Beta is that there is no built-in mapping function. Although Yahoo’s OneSearch includes a search of local business listings, there are no available maps, as far as I can tell. The addition of a mapping feature-a GPS-capable mapping feature would be the best-would help evolve Opera’s Mini application from a useful Internet browser and into a full-fledged mobile service.
Opera’s Mini 4 Beta is available for free at operamini.com.