This is a review on Opera mini’s newest version, 5beta. I am using it on Nokia 5800 Xpress Music. First I installed it to my phone when phone was on firmware version originally come with, that is v21.0.025. I went to ‘m.opera.com/next’ page with phones browser and download it directly to phone (it was something like 250kb in size). Operamini as always is a free JAVA application, so you can use on any Java app supported phone. Installation was easy and quick. I’ve already got Operamini 4.2 installed, it wasn’t affected by this. You can even use both versions simultaneously without a problem.
Main Feature List:
Virtual Keypad –NEW
Multiple Tabs browsing – NEW
Password Manager –NEW
Styling - Improved
Touch optimized -Improved
Touch Optimization:
As you know Nokia 5800 is a full touch phone without any hardware keypad apart from 3 buttons under the screen (read my review on Nokia 5800XM). So it is very necessary any application on it to have touch optimization. Opera-mini v4.2 was works well with touch phones, although it’s not optimized for touch screens. Minus point of that is some small buttons are hard to touch and some inputs are hard to give without hardware keypad. But those were not that big problems in terms of usage. Most annoying thing I found with Operamini v4.2 is sometimes it just quits without warning and all pages browsed are gone. 
It seems to be a problem of memory overflow especially when scrolling pages fast. From the start I checked if this problem persisted, but I didn’t face it yet. (But I’ve got to know that on Firmware v30 some experience that problem especially in large data web sites as ‘Youtube.com’) I’m yet to try youtube.com on this. So the new version is optimized for touch usage, its apparent from the first page. It’s very similar to Opera 9 and 10 versions for PC, if you’re used to that (as myself) you would not find any difficulty of using this Operamini v5.
Navigation:
First page comes with the speed dial, this time it’s similar to one in Opera 9 PC version. First impression of Operamini v5 is great looks, it’s really stylish. All 9 speed dial shortcuts comes with a thumbnail of the website so you can easily touch with finger. You can configure the 9 shortcuts to websites of your choice. Even the settings list comes with bigger menu lists and easy to touch buttons. All the navigations buttons are sized to touch easily. Navigation bar can be set to hide when not used.
Virtual QWERTY Keypad:
Another main thing added to new version is built-in virtual QWERTY keypad. Last version didn’t have the option of inline editing for touch only phones. With its new virtual keypad you can easily input text, like web addresses, username etc. Virtual Keypad is very good, even in portrait mode where keypad is fairly small, it’s very easy to type. I would say it might be better than the original Nokia QWERTY keypad phone comes with! In landscape mode it enlarges as well. V-keypad has QWERTY alpha, 123numeric and Symbol modes. As said it supports Tabbed browsing in the v5, it’s a very useful option to have. You can add multiple tabs in navigation bar. Each tab opens with the speed dial page. I tried using about 5 tabs without any problem; I was too lazy to try more. Password manager is also a good thing added, so you can store username and passwords for websites. Also when you keep your finger touched the
screen longer, a pop-up menu comes with options to ‘Open in New Tab /Open Image / Select text’, so you can open the full image or select text to copy very easily.
Kinetic Scrolling:
Kinetic Scrolling is something Nokia touch users are eagerly waiting for (Kinetic scrolling is flow like scrolling seen in some phones ex: iPhone. When you scroll down it starts scrolling down fast and slows down gradually with a weightless feel. So far Nokia has used it in their beta apps like ‘Photobrowser’). Rumor says that it will be enabled in newer firmware versions, but even the newest v31 firmware doesn’t offer that. But anyway its good to see that Operamini browser got kinetic scrolling. Now its fun to scroll through long web pages.
Perfomance:
Even the new Operamini v5 seem to be loaded with options and stuff it still seems to perform well. I tried to see how much RAM this uses while doing different tasks (these numbers can vary due to different versions of firmware and other factors). I was using firmware v21.0.025 as I said, before starting Operamini v5beta it had 49.5MB of RAM (out of 128MB) available, then after starting it had 41.1MB of RAM. That’s about 8.4MB for the program. Then browsed to an average website, RAM dropped to 40.7MB, that’s about 0.4MB decrease. Then started another tab browsed to another web, RAM got to 40.0MB. Like that I opened tabs, RAM dropped to 39.9MB then when next tab was opened to 39.8MB and so on.. This shows that even you open multiple tabs, your performance won’t be affected that much. Because every tab is like minimized, opening another tab won’t consume the double the RAM. I agree that this is not a very precise measuring of performance but it gives a rough idea.
Refinements Needed:
Even though this is a beta application I should say this perform very well. But there are few things to refine in my opinion. On thing I couldn’t find in virtual keypad was an ‘Enter’ button to get to next line while typing text input. It’s annoying, there might be a button somewhere but I couldn’t still find it. In the v-keypad you can jump between alpha and numeric keys, when you’re in alpha mode there’s a key with ‘123’ written to chose numeric mode, but in numeric mode there’s no ‘abc’ key to jump back to alpha mode, you have to press the same ‘123’ key to go back to alpha mode. Yes it’s not much of a problem once you know that’s that, but first time you might be a bit confused.
In the new version when you try to connect to network you’re asked to give permission to connect, there are 3 options. 1-Only allow for this time, 2-Allow only for this session & 3-Always allow (without asking). So I used 3rd one, it was ok for sometime. But when I close the app and use again sometimes it took longer to connect to network (gprs/edge/3.5G) and even sometimes it connects and disconnects without going to the requested web page. Then I changed ‘Application Manager’ settings in phones settings tab to ‘Ask first time only’ (Phone Menu > Settings > Application Manager > Operamini 5beta > Options > Suite Settings> Network Settings> Ask First Time Only). So when I try to use Opera min 5b now I am asked for permission for network connect, I chose ‘2-Allow Only for this session’. Then it connects to available network without much delay and works without any problem.
But anyway these are only few glitches I found. It’s still a beta so we can hope they’ll rectify these. But these problems won’t be much noticeable when using. In my opinion it maybe the best browser available for across mobile platforms currently. Best of all its FREE. So if your mobile supports Java, do try:
Download http://m.opera.com/next (FREE!!)
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