Of iPhones, Blackberries, and Opera Mini

A good friend of mine recently picked up an iPhone 3G, and I have to say that it is an absolutely gorgeous device. I’ve been a smart phone user since picking up a Blackberry Curve 8310 about a year ago, and would never even consider returning to a ‘normal’ phone. While I love my Blackberry, but I must admit that the iPhone really ups the ante in a couple of respects.

For me, the most obvious difference in the two phones is the web browsing experience. The iPhone runs Safari, built on top of Webkit, and pages actually look and act like the real thing. The Blackberry, on the other hand, uses a proprietary browser built on Java (like everything else on the platform), and provides a distinctly last-generation experience. While his pages look like the real thing, mine are often butchered, missing functionality, and hard to read.

Wanting an iPhone but not willing to pay $700 for the device, and being limited by rumours of Roger’s new 2 year minimum hardware upgrade policy, I decided to take a shot at improving my mobile experience with Opera Mini for the Blackberry instead. I had heard excellent things about this app from a friend, and while Opera only claims about 2% of the browser market, I’ve read some excellent reviews, and encountered a few rabid fans.

After downloading and installing the browser, I was immediately greeted by the best web experience that I’ve ever had on a mobile device (short of the iPhone of course). Pages render beautifully, Javascript runs fast, and the entire page is displayed on load. You can choose the section of the page that you’re interested in, and the browser zooms in to an appropriate size for reading. While browsing the page, each link is highlighted so that you can easily see where they are, and the view automatically shifts and resizes so that the entirety of the current paragraph is in view. The user can choose to download low, medium, or high quality copies of images depending on the speed of their connection (I chose low because my phone does not support 3G or WiFi), so even image-heavy pages look great while loading fast.

While using the browser, the idea that gets into your head is that it was designed by people who had actually used mobile browsers for a long period of time, and thought really hard about features that made sense on a low-bandwidth connection with a smallish screen. As an example, I often bookmark RSS feeds from sites that I like to follow, because it’s faster to browse the headlines and then click through to interesting stories than to load up each page individually on my 2G connection. Opera Mini places a link to a listing of all RSS feeds available from a particular site in the top corner of every page, making it fast and easy to add new pages to my bookmarks list.

The only complaint that I have so far about this program is that it seems to eat the keypress events from my system keys, meaning that I can’t raise or lower the volume or pause my music while simultaneously browsing the web. No matter, as a quick tap on the end key minimizes the app, after which the keys work as expected.

All in all, I am incredibly impressed with this application and highly reccomend it to anybody looking to add a little love to their mobile browsing experience without shelling out for a steve-phone just yet.