UIQ enabled mobiles come with built-in Opera Mobile v.6, a lot of changes and updates have been made since then but only for S60 series of Nokia and Windows Mobile. So here we’ll play a little bit and test the latest available Opera and will see if Minimo is really the Mobile “Firefox”.
Opera 8.6 Mobile
The start screen is a simple screen with a number of links and a Yahoo search box. Although Opera usually supports Google on this version the search partner is Yahoo!.
Opera supports tab browsing, it supported it even in version six, the version that comes built-in with Sony Ericsson P990i and M600i. Supports a great deal of JavaScript and AJaX. Understands the mobile profiles and CSS media attribute. Highly mobile friendly.
Just like the WM Internet Explorer, it supports three kind of views:
- Single Column
- Desktop View
- ScreenFit
It works fine with Mobile Optimized web pages and displays them right.
Minimo, the Mobile Firefox?
Just because it is hosted at Mozilla and uses the Mozilla engine doesn’t mean that this browser is really good, however, it is impressive. Tabbed, Toolbar-enabled rather than menu based interface. It’s so slow though.
It is really bad with background images, it displays them with wrong colors, it is basically a disastrous process of browsing pages with many graphics and stylings.
Worst of all, it does not understand the “media” attribute of CSS link reference, thus, it treats bot Screen and Handheld as the same profile and renders the same way.
Both of the browsers were made for Windows Mobile, Opera is really advanced and matured and it is obvious, it is incredibly Fast, faster than the Opera built-in in Sony Ericsson’s UIQ based mobiles. Minimo comes out really slow, it takes 2,3 minutes to load given an average Windows Mobile. After loading, accessing the UI is really slow as opening a new tab would take relatively long.
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