Opera Software announced the production release of Opera Mini 4.2 today. The new release, a minor upgrade from 4.1, is largely unchanged from the 4.2 Beta launched two weeks ago. It includes bug fixes, the addition of Cyrillic language characters to the browser’s “small” font and a version of Opera Mini 4.2 for the T-Mobile G1 Android phone.
Compared to 4.1, 4.2 adds:
Skins: Change Opera’s look using predefined schemes.
Improved Performance: a new US based server farm increases performance in the States by 30%. You must use 4.2 to be able to take advantage of this.
Direct Video: Opera Mini 4.2 opens RTSP videos in the phone’s video player without first launching the built in browser.
Synchronized Notes: Opera Mini 4.2 includes the Notes feature from Opera’s desktop browsers. Notes as well as bookmarks are now synchronized over the air between Mini and Desktop.
G1 users will find Opera Mini 4.2 in the Android Market. Everyone else can download it directly to their phone by visiting mini.opera.com, or to a PC for side loading from operamini.com/download/pc/.
Opera Mini has over 20 million unique users, more than the iPhone which has only sold around 15 million units worldwide. That statistic should be of interest to developers of iPhone Web Apps. Opera Mini provides an iPhone-like browsing experience to users of most ordinary mobile phones. In my experience many Web Apps designed for the iPhone work fine in Opera Mini, which has fairly good JavaScript support and can load pages and images of any size. Unfortunately, most iPhone specific sites use browser detection to limit access to iPhones only. You can validate that your iPhone Web App works in Opera Mini using the online emulator at operamini.com/demo/. If it does, make it available to Opera Mini users and double your traffic!
In other browser news, Naiyer at oh.dirlink.mobi tipped me that there is a new WebKit based browser for UIQ 3.1 touchscreen phones. It’s called Ozone and you can download it from o3mobi.com. It sounds interesting claiming to be three times faster than the default Opera Mobile browser and has support for HTML5’s client side database. Too bad I don’t have a compatible phone or I’d be all over this.
Joe, I don’t think there is a mobile chrome browser except the G1. If i’m wrong please correct me because I’ve tried to look and found nothing.
Right, Dennis, I don’t know if this is the right place but there is another opera browser, for s60 devices, that you might want to look at – opera widgets. Bare with me, .cause it’s a bit tricky, but here goes: 1st uninstall opera mobile as it will give you an update error. Download the opera widgets sdk from the opera website, unpack it and click on the widgets sis file. Now launch it and then click on the widgets manager. Scroll down to the opera asa copyright link and click on that. Well now you’re at the my opera full web right from which you can go anywhere. However that may mean soon you’ll have ram problems. Therefore scroll down to opera links, sign in, and click on your mobilising link ( I use phonefavs ) and use that. Btw, I should have said it will at first try to launch your inbuilt browser – just cancel it and you will be back to widgets. Anyway an interesting preview of opera mobiles eventual and full launch. But its quite buggy so be carefull!
Hmmm… I wonder if it beats Google’s Chrome on Android – one of the best browsers on mobile I have seen in ages – does google maps etc.