With smart phones slowly but surely taking over the cell phone market, more people are browsing the web using iPhones and Android-based devices all the time. I absolutely love my aging Samsung Moment, but I have to admit that the clunky web browser that it came with is horrible. In a nutshell, it’s SLOW! Well, I finally decided to do something about it.
After reading a couple of rave reviews touting the speed and usability improvements of the Opera Mini mobile web browser, I took the plunge and downloaded it the other night. Guess what? The reviews were right on the money. This little jewel virtually transformed my Moment from a snail into a gazelle! Pages that used to take a minute or longer to load via 3G now take seconds! I simply can’t believe the difference it made.
Of course 3G is 3G, and nothing you can install onto a smart phone is going to make it any faster. Opera Mini takes the brakes off the browsing experience by first loading the web pages you wish to view onto a back-end server, then transmitting a highly compressed version of those pages to the phone over the 3G network. Fewer bytes transmitted means less time required to receive the page. The setup is pure genius if you ask me.
When I first read that my phone would be receiving compressed pages, my intial reaction was “The pages are going to look like garbage”. In reality, the browser software on the phone does such a good job at re-constructing and rendering the pages that I can tell no difference whatsoever in the quality of the page display.
Opera Mini offers a number of other enhancements over my standard Android browser as well, my favorite being a really nifty feature that displays little thumbnail images of the pages that are open in the browser at any given time. To switch from one page to another you simply touch the appropriate thumbnail and it opens right up! Even better, gone are the days of trying to coax the browser into properly handling a link when one is activated. Opera Mini makes “clicking” links and opening pages in a new window a piece of cake.
In summary, to say that I’m a huge fan of the Opera Mini web browser would be the understatement of the year. This is software the way it ought to be! If you’re using an iPhone or Android phone, why not give it a try? It’s free, it’s fast, and I love it!!
Android users can download Opera Mini directly from the “Market”. If you’d rather read up on it a little more first, this is a great place to start.
About the author: Rick Rouse is the owner of RLROUSE.COM.