To help us provide you with free impartial advice, we may earn a commission if you buy through links on our site. Learn more
With the Android version of its Mobile web browser, Opera is hoping to make the internet faster, smoother and easier to use on the small screen of a smartphone. Currently in Beta, we downloaded the latest version (Opera Mobile 10.1) to find out how good it really is.
As it’s in Beta, there’s no guarantee that the software will work on all devices. Testing on a Samsung Galaxy Tab we couldn’t get the browser to work at all; all we got was the splash screen, before the Tab switched back to the previous application we were looking at. However, on our Nexus One we had no such problems.
Opera’s done a good job with the interface, fitting a small, always-visible toolbar at the bottom of the screen. This contains navigation, refresh, tabs and settings buttons. The fact that they’re so handy makes it easy to browse the web, although you can hide them if you find that they take up too much screen space.
Hitting the tab button opens a small panel containing thumbnails of the sites you’ve got open, with the option to close each window or create a new one. It works well and is an improvement over the text interface of the default Android browser, but it’s not as slick or as easy to use as the HTC or Samsung Galaxy versions, which take up the entire screen.
Opera prides itself on having a fast rendering engine and pages were quick to load on our phone. Testing directly against the default Android browser we found that Opera loaded Expert Reviews a couple of seconds quicker, although this isn’t too much to get excited about. The quality of the rendering was mostly good, although Expert Reviews had some errors in its navigation bar, despite the fact that the website displays properly in the native Android browser.
The upshot of this is that some websites that don’t work properly in the Android browser worked here. For example, the Argos ordering site wouldn’t let us fill out our credit card expiry date using the Android browser, but it worked perfectly using Opera.
Selecting anywhere on screen automatically zooms in to a comfortable viewing distance, so you can read text more clearly. By default this automatic zoom is set to 160 per cent, although you can adjust this in the Settings menu if you prefer. Text is automatically wrapped to the screen, although not on all sites; as with the default Android browser some forums and other sites cause text to hang off the side of the screen.
One of the main features of Opera is the Opera Turbo mode. Disabled by default, turning it on enables compression, allowing you to download complete websites faster and with less data. On a mobile connection it can make a big difference, with the added bonus that it can save on your data costs to. The trade-off is that image quality can deteriorate, so it’s good that the selection of this option is entirely up to you. If you want to read pages while you’re offline, Opera can download and save pages at the click of a button.
The Start Page (called this in the software, but Speed Dial on the Opera website) is also a great tool, showing up thumbnails of up to nine customisable websites – just tap the one you want to load. We also like Opera Link, which automatically synchronises your bookmarks and Start Page with your Opera web browser on other computers and devices.
Sadly, Opera currently has one big disappointment for Android 2.2 users: there’s no Flash support. Visiting a website with Flash in it just tells you that there’s ‘Plug in content’, but you can’t do anything about it. Considering that one of the main benefits of Android is its Flash support, it’s disappointing that Opera hasn’t implemented support in its browser yet.
With this version we don’t think that Opera Mobile is as good as the Android browser, particularly if you have a tweaked version, such as on an HTC or Samsung phone. For standard Android users, the DolphinHD browser is currently a better choice, as it supports Flash and even lets you customise it to appear as a desktop browser so that you never get stuck on a poor mobile site. That said, in our tests Opera Mobile did work on some websites that the Android browser didn’t, so it may be a good backup in some situations.
| Details | |
|---|---|
| Price | £0 |
| Details | www.opera.com |
| Rating | *** |
