Cellphones News

The next version of Opera Mobile browser will be announched next week at CTIA. The new version, now in Opera Mobile 9.7, is ready to give you support for the new Opera compression technology, Opera Turbo. Thus, we can hope for its browsing speed as the Turbo claim, compressing data by 80%. Pretty nice…

The new Opera browser also comes with newest Presto 2.2 rendering engine (as seen on Opera 10 desktop version), support to Web technologies include Flash and Ajax, and also better developer tools and standards support, Google Gears support as well as hardware acceleration Open GL ES.

Continue reading ‘Opera Mobile 9.7 will be Here Soon. Very Soon. [CTIA rumor]’ »

Finally, Opera have unveiled the latest and final version of the Opera Mini 4.2 for mobile phone. And what’s interesting is that the new Opera Mini 4.2 Final version also supports Android Platform. Hurrraaahh!!

Users in U.S will enjoy 30% faster browsing experience and users in India will cheer since the new Opera Mini 4.2 Final version have supported 12 different Indian language. Wow. Here’s some quote from the press release:

The latest prodigy in Opera’s mobile browser family promises to heighten the mobile Web experience due to improvements in speed, video support and Opera Link functionality, in addition to its availability on the Android platform.

Some features of the new Opera Mini 4.2 Final Version are:

• More than 90 language versions, including the recently added Amharic, Armenian, Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Kirghiz, Lingala, Marathi, Malayalam, Mongolian, Oriya, Punjabi, Pashto, Sinhala, Tajik, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, Uzbek, Khmer, Kashmiri, Lao and Turkmen
• Funky new skins for personalizing the look of Opera Mini
• Opera Link support for notes, allowing users to sync their notes between the PC and Opera Mini
• Improved real time streaming protocol (RTSP) handoff. This increases the number of phones with support for mobile video.

Download the free opera Mini 4.2 here, while Sprint Instinct users will have to upgrade their firmware here to use the new Opera Mini 4.2

Update: you can also download the free version from Android Market, and here’s a changelog from the beta version:

• Now you can upload and download files through Opera Mini and save pages for offline viewing
• Videos will be redirected to the system’s video player
• Double tap now works for zooming in and out
• Inline URL entry instead of using native input
• Fixed password text entry to hide characters
• Fixed problems with exiting application when back button was pressed
• Improved trackball speed
• All internal pages, like the start page, now have font size extra large for easier navigation

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There are many news about browser around lately, aren’t they? Just a while ago I posted a heartbreaking news about the divorce of Android OS and Fennec and the Opera Mini for Android G1. Now prepare for the arrival of the Opera Mini 4.2 Beta!!! You can download Opera Mini 4.2 Beta version by following the link under this post.

I guess all of us agree that the Opera Mini is the most famous mobile browser to date, and Opera claimed that each month, unique downloads of Opera Mini reached 20 million. Woooowww….That’s 12 x 20 million = 240,000,000 unique downloads a year!

They’ve created a bit of a song and dance over this preview with more customised new skins, and better support for mobile video services such as YouTube.

Other improvements relate to Opera Link, which allows phone users to share notes, bookmarks, and browsing history between their mobile phones and their PCs.

Opera has also upped the browsing and loading performance by introducing a new server in the US of A. This is coupled with reducing the load on servers elsewhere in the world, therefore making it faster everywhere else too. Isn’t that just wonderful.

They believe they’ve seen an average growth of 10% in users of Opera Mini every month on a global basis. As their browser just keeps on improving in speed and functionality, Opera expects Mini’s popularity to just keep growing. Hurrah!

It’s around now to download in a standard version in both JAR and JAD formats, and is also around for BlackBerrys and Palms too.

Here are the download Opera Mini 4.2 links:

Point your phone’s browser to mini.opera.com/beta to download the beta version of Opera Mini 4.2.

Opera Mini 4.2 beta installs next to any existing stable Opera Mini version on your device and will not overwrite any of your data.

Alternatively, you may download Opera Mini to your computer for a manual installation.

• Standard Opera Mini 4.2 beta JAR (124 KB)
• Standard Opera Mini 4.2 beta JAD (4 KB)
• BlackBerry Opera Mini 4.2 beta ZIP archive (104 KB)
• Palm (requires JVM installed) Opera Mini 4.2 beta PRC (316 KB)

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Hello there! I think that most of us already know the Opera Web Browser and some of us (including me) have fallen in love in the mini version of it, the Opera Mini. And now the Opera Mini 4.0 is available and you can download the T-Mobile G1 freeware by following the link I provide under this post. Anyway, this is the first version of Opera browser that runs on the Android platform.

The Opera Mini browser renders web pages that have been transcoded to the binary OBML format, meaning much smaller downloads and a faster browsing experience on mobiles, than would be provided by other browsers. The Android WebKit-based browser component has a switch in the public API allowing the use of a transcoding proxy that transcodes web pages to a simpler form of HTML. Whether this is as small and fast as Opera Mini’s OBML remains to be seen.

Known issues:
* Small painting issues
* The Back command isn’t yet mapped to the device back button

I Love Freeware!!:)

[Download Android T-Mobile G1 Freeware: Opera Mini 4.0]

NB: It’s an apk file; you can learn how to install it here

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Skyfire is a relatively new yet reliable mobile browser, and I do believe that the browser can pace the Opera Mini and Firefox Mobile.. The Skyfire have similarity with the Opera Mini in terms of most of the work done on rendering a webpage is actually done remotely. This helps to reduce page load times on your phone quite significantly. SkyFire is currently in BETA stage and is meant to be open only to US residents. Read on to get SkyFire on your device without having to move to the United States of America.

To get SkyFire:

1. Go to the SkyFire Register page HERE.
2. Fill in your details. Make sure you give a real email address as you’ll need it later on. In the phone number field enter any random series of numbers, just mash at your keyboard!
3. You’ll get a confirmation email that contains a link saying ‘Download to PC’, click on it and you’ll be taken to a page where you must create a password for your SkyFire account. After creating the password the SkyFire installation file will start downloading.
4. Copy the installation file to your phone and install as normal. When opening SkyFire for the first time you’ll be asked to input the email address you registered with and the password you created in the previous step.

Enjoy!

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Just yesterday I have posted an article saying that Apple prohibited Opera Mini browser for iPhone. Here’s an update. According to my source at the cellpassion, he have met Opera’s CEO, Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner in New Delhi in early October. Of course, he have asked the question related to the rumor and here’s the quote:

“Did Opera toy with the idea of developing a browser for the iPhone?” While he did not answer the question directly, he told me “off the record” that his engineers had in fact had some fun developing a version of Opera Mini for the iPhone. He further added that it was just an in-house experiment and the team behind it does not intend to show it off since it is very crude and would need lot of work before it can be at a stage where it can be shown to the outside world. However. at the moment, they have their hands full and it is unlikely that they will work on it.

I never reported it, respecting the fact that the information was shared with me in good faith that it won’t be written about. However, after someone else reported it, I felt it correct to clear the air. What is being reported in major tech blogs is only half-correct. While it is true that Opera toyed with porting Opera Mini on the iPhone, it wasn’t their intention to attempt to launch it on the App Store. It was just an internal experiment. They always knew that Apple would not allow to let it go on the Store and that’s probably why they never bothered.

Even in the original source, von Tetzchner is quoted as “Apple won’t let the company release it…” and not that Apple has banned Opera from releasing Opera Mini on the App Store. There is a big difference between ‘won’t’ and ‘didn’t’ and I think that most reporters missed the point. The bottomline is that yes, Opera toyed with the idea but it never went ahead with listing it on the App Store.

Well, now that the word is already out, how about trying to release Opera Mini on the iPhone? We won’t mind jailbreaking ours just to get faster Internet browsing on our iPhone’s lousy EDGE connection.

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Well this is interesting… Recently my source have posted an interesting article based on a famous newspaper the NYTimes. They said that Opera Software have succeeded in making Opera Mini Browser that can run on the iPhone, yet the iPhone’s manufacturer Apple have blocked them. The reason behind this act is because the Apple decided to protect its Safari -their built in web browser- from Opera. Here’s the quote:

Mr. von Tetzchner said that Opera’s engineers have developed a version of Opera Mini that can run on an Apple iPhone, but Apple won’t let the company release it because it competes with Apple’s own Safari browser.

This could be something to do with the Javascript interpreter, or Apple restricting applications which compete with their built in iPhone applications such as Safari. With Apple restricting apps, especially alternative browsers, iPhoner will probably not be seeing an alternative such as FireFox anywhere on the Apple App Store very soon.

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Opera and Safari software development center is sweating as the new competitor Skyfire has emerged. I’m pretty sure that most of you have familiar with Opera and Safari. Opera is a well-known as the best free browser for most platform and Safari is a powerful browser integrated in the iPhone.

Skyfire, the brand new browser, are challenging them with faster loading capability and built-in Flash, AJAX, and Silverlight support. You need not to open Youtube or Google Maps in separate application. The browser originally was launched for Windows Mobile, but now they are in beta for Symbian S60-based phone. Techcrunch is offering invitation for their 200 readers to try out the beta application.

Moreover, Laptop Mag has created a recaps comparing Opera, Safari, and Skyfire; where Skyfire was tested on Windows Mobile:

As we can see in table above, Skyfire definitely outperform all other mobile browser, while Opera is in the bottom for perfomance. Skyfire is definitely the only mobile browser that supports Flash. Can’t wait for Skyfire to be launched in J2ME version too!

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