Opera Mini 4.1was announced yesterday, and I have downloaded it to my Nokia N95 8GB to give it a try out.  My first impressions was that it is an easy to operate web browser that is slightly more intuitive to use than the standard Nokia web browser. 

Opera Mini mobile web browser is free and can be downloaded from here, or by pointing your current mobile browser at http://operamini.com. It is a small application (about 120kb) that features automatic completion of web addresses, is now faster (due to Opera upgrading their servers), allows uploading and downloading of files (without being transferred to your phones native browser), saving and viewing pages for offline use and, perhaps most useful, you can search for text within a page.  I found out from the Opera website that the mobile software uses a remote server to pre-process the web pages before sending them, thus allowing the page to be compressed for smaller data transfers, to enhance the speed of surfing on your mobile.  This, for me, is a big plus if you are commuting to work and don’t have access to a wireless point.

The new version keeps the great features from the previous version, such as synchronising  bookmarks from your desktop or other mobile device running Opera Mini.  Of course Opera on the desktop is not the most popular of browsers so you might have to import your bookmarks to Opera desktop to sync them to your mobile…a hassle worth going through?  It also has the landscape mode for viewing pages and has power scrolling shortcuts, with zooming! 

One annoyance, that was also present in the older version of mini browser, is that when you are typing into a form it switches from the browser to the phone text editor.  I would prefer to just type straight into the form field, like the nokia browser does.

I have been trying the browser out in various websites, mobile and normal.  The mobile bbc website pages do load quickly and even this blog loads at a not unreasonable speed!  The mini browser also allows easy subscriptions to feeds, more intuitively than the nokia browser…

The next obvious question, ‘what is the competition’?  A quick search on google will bring up any number of other browsers, some only for windows mobile such as deepfish, but the two that caught my eye for further investigation were skyfire (currently in beta testing) and jB5 (which I hope to test out sometime this week).