Opera Mobile 9.5… Well Almost!

Posted by: Peter Murphy on May 25 2008

Earlier this week in a Press Release, Opera Software let us know that the HTC Diamond is getting it’s own customised version of the latest version of Opera Mobile.

The HTC-specific version of Opera Mobile 9.5 introduces a new intuitive user interface (UI) and includes numerous innovative features that elevate the Internet experience on a phone. Page viewing and panning allows users to scan and navigate pages quickly while Opera Zoom enables users to dive into the page and get closer to the content they want. Turning the device sideways automatically rotates the Web page view from a portrait to landscape view.

Thomas also did a post earlier this week that included a great video of Opera 9.5 at work, and it really looks good. So how can I get my hands on this and check it out I’m thinking to myself. There are ways and means, and lots of industrious people out there, and it seems someone has done a bit of work and extracted a copy of the Browser from the Diamond, worked on it a bit and turned it into a few .cab files so that we can try it out. Now I admire these guys for the work that they do, it’s way above my capabilities as a WinMo user, and testing out hacked apps like this is not to be taken lightly.

I’m doing this so that you don’t have to, and to satisfy my curiosity, because I still think Opera has the best Mobile Browser and would hope the next update is worth the money.

Before I actually get into the meat of this post, I will say, the linked cab files are hacked and not stable. If you want to try this out yourself, make sure you do a full backup before you install the appropriate .cab for your device. I have had to restore each time I have tried the hacked version out, so… don’t do it and I’ll fill you in!

So how great is Opera 9.5, well it’s the best browser I’ve used and it’s not even a general release. Again I will say, this is not an official release and I don’t recommend that you try it if you are not confident, it will create problems with your device.

Now for your info, I’m running a version of WM 6.1, which is not legal on my Axim x51v, that is the best, most stable OS I’ve had. Not having any problems with the OS and everything going well I thought I’d try this Opera Beta. I like to do things like this you know. Someone just said to me

"if you don’t give me the opportunity to purchase something, then what’s the problem with me going out and finding it on my own?",

and that’s what people do isn’t it. "Curiosity Killed the Cat" though.

Initially I installed to SD Card and things deteriorated quite quickly, although the browser worked quite well for all of an hour. So i uninstalled and restored the backup I made just before I installed. Re-installed to device and t was much more stable, although it interfered with Pocket Plus, close button functionality went out the window, making getting the screenshots quite difficult.

To the browser itself, it loads fairly quickly, with a new loader animation, and I had no problems with it detecting that I was connected to my wifi network. Load time for Jamm the first time was about 7 seconds, of course once the site was cached it lessened greatly.

Navigation and scrolling are great, fluid, and the way Opera fits to the screen is brilliant. By default if you have set the browser to not display "Mobile View" you get a fit to screen desktop view. Real websites on the small screen. Unreadable as it was like this, a quick double tap on the screen will give you instant full zoom, and the sweet thing here is that the text adjusts for the zoom level. TextFlo I’ve heard it called, and exactly as it’s called, Opera performs. Over all levels of zoom that the browser does, it fits the text to the screen, this means that you may have to scroll up and down further, which means there is minimal side to side scrolling.

Even more impressive is the lack of clutter and complicated configuration settings, it is so simple to set up, and navigate.

It was really simple, and self explanatory to work through the settings, all in really user friendly language as well. Installing this over Opera 8.65 transferred all of my main settings from it as well. Making the setup even simpler.

As you can see from the landscape image above, when set to automatic full screen, you get a navigation link in the bottom right hand corner to toggle back to your program navigation links. It annoyed me a bit, I thought it could have been more transparent so as to mar the page view a little less.
From right to left you have, Menu, Home,Tabs, Favourites and Back. Again very simple and self explanatory. The main Menu is easily understandable, although I’ve seen downloads as transfers on another look at the browser.

Page info will tell you about the page that you are looking at at the time, History will show you a list of links that you have been surfing through, from today into the never never. A nice touch is the ability to save pages easily and view offline. One note here, although you can save pages offline, to add favourites you will need to manually navigate to the pages you want to bookmark as there doesn’t seem to be a way to import your favourites in this version at the moment. There’s also a tap and hold context menu, that again really doesn’t need much explaining, but a really nice feature is the ability to search the text in a page, using the Find In Page search option.

Another nice feature is the ability to share bookmarks, in a variety of ways.

Although this is an unofficial release of this version of Opera’s newest browser, I’m glad I made the effort to try it out, even though I encountered software conflicts, previewing this offering from Opera leaves me looking forward to it’s release, thanks to the anonymous donor that made this available.

This is a release that I’ll be waiting for, that’s for sure.

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