Download Review: Opera Mini is the best web experience for mobile phones

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.

Opera Mini 7 has a new home screen with two tabs. The right hand tab is the familiar speed dial page with icons for your favourite websites. This list can be synchronised with a desktop installation of Opera with a free Opera account. The limit on the number of shortcuts that can be saved has been removed so you can scroll a longer list if you want. This is also handy for situations where you have a large number of speed dial shortcuts set up on the desktop.

The left-hand, and default, tab is more interesting as it pulls in information from websites you have visited in the past as well as Twitter and Facebook. For example, we read some pages on the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages wiki. When we next started Opera Mini there were updates from the site on the home page. 

The Share button 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.

The most obvious change in the new version is that some space at the top of the screen is used to show the signal strength and battery level, at least on our Symbian based Nokia 5230. This is useful information but we'd rather use the space for displaying webpages.

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

Opera Mini 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.

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.