Opera Mini

Opera Mini is an internet browser for mobile phones with a clever trick up its sleeve.

All of the web traffic travels through the Opera servers where it is compressed. This makes browsing faster and reduces costs when charged for data.

Even though this is less common, the compression still helps make the most of a daily or monthly limit.

The Opera Mini home screen has space for nine shortcuts. Some are already set up but all can be changed. Tap and hold to see a menu with the edit option. Tabbed browsing is supported and it is easy to switch between them.

Opera Mini 6 has made some changes to the way the interface works with an Opera button instead of the old spanner icon. This makes it look more consistent with the Desktop version.

Also new is the Share button that provides a quick way to post links to Facebook, Twitter or the My Opera social network.

Pages can either be viewed in full with a quick tab to zoom in, or with the Mobile view. The Mobile view reorders the page to better fit it in the smaller window of mobile devices and pinch to zoom is available on devices that support multitouch.

Some reordering also occurs when you zoom into a normal view window. This means that you don't have to scroll from side to side to read an article.

Opera Link means that you can synchronise bookmarks and other settings with Opera running on a desktop computer.

Opera Mini 6 can set itself as the default browser for a device and now comes with support for features such as auto-rotation and high-resolution screens.

RSS news feeds are supported, although they are only downloaded on request to prevent excessive data usage.

We encountered some connection problems when moving between the mobile network and Wifi on our test phone. Opera Mini needed to be restarted

As there are different versions of Opera Mini for different phones, the download link will take you to the Opera Mini and Mobile website where you can download the correct version. Or visit http://m.opera.com on your device.