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What’s the best mobile browser out there? On my Nokia 6670, I’ve tried NetFront 3.2, Opera for mobile (the 15-day trial). Both of these run neck-to-neck in terms to overall experience. There are a few features NetFront has that Opera doesn’t, and vice versa. But I wasn’t happy with either of them - the speed, the rendering, the fonts (awful for both) - mobile browsing wasn’t quite there yet, I thought.

Enter Opera Mini. In a single stroke, Opera has managed to eliminate most, if not all, of the problems that plagued the other browser offerings out there. Opera Mini is a Java application, so advantage number one is that it’ll run on any phone that can run Java apps - so it doesn’t have to be a Nokia smartphone running Symbian Series60, or the high-end Sony Ericsson or Motorola ones. Repeat - it is not a native Symbian or Windows Mobile or Palm application; it’s a Java app.

There are two version of this phone - for low and high memory phones. So for those of you with, for instance, a Nokia 6610 (amazing phone, wish I owned one), you can try the low-memory version. The high-memory version will run on the Nokia 6600, 6630, 6670, 6680, 7710, nGage, and I guess the N-series. See the beauty? Even the Nokia 6610 can have a full-featured browser now! All you need is Java and a GPRS/3G connection.

That’s the Basic (MIDP 1)-type browser.

And that’s the Advanced (MIDP 2) browser.
The installation is dead-simple: it’s a direct download from www.opera.com/mini, no licence agreements, no filling out forms or anything. Click, download, install - right from your existing browser. Or of course, you could download it on your PC/laptop and copy it to your phone via Infrared/Bluetooth/plain old USB. At 100KB, it’s one of the smallest applications I’ve come across. And for a browser, that is stupendous.

And the browsing experience is something else! Opera Mini renders its own fonts, and it does a very good job of that. The default font is very very readable, and there’s also a small font option that packs much more onto one screen, while still keeping things very clear. The sheer quality of the fonts hits you. Those with small screens (low memory phones) will love the small font option. The home page has an address bar, a Google search box, a list of configurable bookmarks, and a short history. Cool!

Before I get any further, here’s a quickie on how Opera Mini works - your requests go via an Opera server, which does the page retrieval on your behalf, parses the page, makes it phone-friendly and passes it back to the phone, taking a huge rendering load off the tiny mobile browser. It also handles the available network bandwidth quite well ( Russell Beattie thinks that it does a very good job of overcoming “network latency”), so your GPRS connection does feel very fast and responsive.

Flip side/annoyances? Sure. Since it isn’t a native application, there’s a confirmation box that pops up on my Nokia phone, asking if I want to allow the application to connect to the Internet, every time I click on a link. I’m used to it now, but it’s annoying nevertheless. Then again, being a Java application means that if you leave it in memory for a couple of days, it’ll eat up almost all your phone RAM - so that means exiting and restarting the browser. Also, no downloads. Shocking, but true! You can’t use Opera Mini to download anything to your hard disk, so you’ll have to use NetFront for that.

I’ve become a huge fan! I use this browser on the train shuttling between Mumbai and Pune, on the bus to-and-fro work - I’ve even begun checking and replying to my email first thing in the morning, before I’ve even read the morning paper. Oh, and if my newspaper walla plays truant, I end up reading the paper on Opera Mini too! Go get it!

(Doesn’t it sound like one of those TeleBrand ads you see too often lately?!)