Browse the web on the move with Opera Mobile

Opera Mobile is the big brother to Opera Mini and is a full browser on a phone or tablet.

It uses the Opera Presto software to display web pages in their entirety, unlike Opera Mini which downloads a specially compressed version of the web page.

By default Opera Mobile downloads web pages directly from the website without the speed increase of Opera Mini. Enabling Opera Turbo in the browser settings will start using this feature. Having the choice is useful if you use a Wifi connection rather than a mobile connection. It is also possible to enable a Mobile view, which reformats pages to better fit on smaller screens.

Opera Mobile uses tabbed browsing and links can be opened in a new tab by tapping and holding a link until the menu appears.

Opera has it's own onscreen keyboard. By default this is only used for entering addresses but it can be used for any text input. This might be worth enabling on some phones as it is a good keyboard.

In a move to make Opera Mobile look more like the Desktop browser, the spanner Settings icon has been replaced with an Opera logo for the browser menu. This now has a send button for quickly sharing links via text message, email or other messaging installed on the device.

Pages are shown zoomed out and a double-tap zooms in so that the text is readable. The margins are recalculated in this view so there is no need to scroll from side to side. The double-tap is required because single tapping on a link will open it, even in the zoomed out view.

As a more capable browser than Opera Mini, Mobile requires a more powerful device to give good performance.

If you are having difficulty choosing between the two versions, the Opera Specifications page has a useful comparison table.