whistler’s blog

A very good software is out for the J2ME mobile phones, Opera Mini. Although I in no way like the desktop Opera browser which I used a few years back, I found this to be the best web browser freely available for Java phones. Opera Mini outperforms others because it uses a gateway which processes the pages before serving them, it scales images to a suitable size for mobiles, compresses the text and removes ads. The result is fast web browsing over a slow GPRS connection.

The browser takes reasonable time to load, not instantly, but better than what most J2ME programs take. It has a user friendly interface. I particularly like the bookmarks feature where the favicon is also saved along with the URL, and links to several of the popular sites comes preset in the bookmarks, you can simply select the link instead of typing in the URL even when you use the browser for the first time.

However there also are some drawbacks, not everyone would like the reddish theme the browser has, and there is no option to change it. Sadly gmail cannot be checked using this. The browser uses a gateway which means if there is heavy load on the gateway, browsing may become very slow. And if at any point Opera want to shutdown the service it can do it very easily. For example they may want to make this a paid service. Otherwise the browser makes use of all technology available to make a breakthrough in providing a browser for Java phones.