Opera Mini 5 Beta for Windows Mobile

Opera Mini has been available for some time and is not only a great mobile browser but helps keeps data costs down. This is because all the traffic is directed via the Opera servers, where it is compressed before being sent to you. As there is less to download it is also faster than other browsers.

This latest version is a native Windows Mobile program, rather than relying on the Java engine, making the browser itself much faster. In fact it was fast enough that it's become our prefered browser on our Windows Mobile test device. And it was easier to use Opera Mini to browse Google Mail than the dedicated Java app from Google.

Starting the browser shows the familiar Speed Dial interface from the desktop version with 9 shortcuts for commonly used websites. It also supports tabbed browsing so you can have several pages open at the same time.

It's compatible with mobile phones that have touchscreens or keyboards and there is a tool for searching within documents.

Our only frustration with Opera Mini is that it sometimes shows an overview of the page with the option to zoom in. There is a mobile view that can be turned on but it is not always used. This can be frustrating when the zoomed view does not show the full width of text in an article and this sometimes happened even when the mobile view was turned on.

Click here for the Java and Blackberry versions of Opera Mini or enter m.opera.com/next in the phone browser.