Today we launched the native version of Opera Mini 5 beta for Windows Mobile 5- and 6- based handsets. …

Yesterday afternoon the Opera Mini servers were upgraded to version 4.16.916. This upgrade is special introducing an upgrade to a newer version of Opera Presto, our rendering engine.

• Upgraded to Opera Presto 2.4 (see http://www.opera.com/docs/specs/presto24/ for changes, but be aware that not all of them apply to Opera Mini)
  
  
• New user agent string:
  
  "Opera/9.80 (J2ME/MIDP; Opera Mini/$CLIENT_VERSION/908; U; $CLIENT_LANG) Presto/2.4.15"
  
  
• Fixed issue with wrong links being clicked after going back in history
  
  
• Various bug fixes and improvements in site compatibility
  
  

Today Opera Mobile 10 moves one step closer towards final with the release of Opera Mobile 10 Beta 3 for both Symbian/S60 and Windows Mobile. Beta 3 includes a few new features, and a lot of bug fixing and stabilization. Read more on www.opera.com/mobile. Or download it now at www.opera.com/mobile/download/ from a PC or "m.opera.com" from a mobile phone.



New improvements include:



Windows Mobile Keypad Support:

Opera Mobile 10 Beta 3 now supports keypad devices running Windows Mobile 6 standard, and Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone devices.



Experimental Flashlite 3.1 (Windows Mobile):

This beta also brings experimental Flash support to Windows Mobile (touch devices only). However, Flash performance and usability depends greatly on how powerful your device is. On the 1Ghz HTC Touch HD2 the overall experience is quite good. On anything slower it varies from mediocre to poor.



For this reason we have disabled flash by default in the Opera Mobile settings. To enable flash goto Tools -> Settings -> Advanced and set plug-ins to "On".



Note that Opera Mobile has Click-to-play functionality for plug-ins. So even when plug-ins are enabled you activate individual Flash content by clicking on it. This to minimize the use of bandwith and CPU on content you may not be interested it





We also wanted to take the chance to thank the Opera Mobile community for all of the great feedback and bug reporting on the Beta 1 & Beta 2 releases. The feedback has been truly helpful and has made a direct impact for us reaching Beta 3 status. We look forward to your feedback on today’s beta.



The main improvements from the previous betas are:



S60:

- Support for non-latin characters in the UI also when phone is set to latin locale (requires international build)

- A lot of input and keyboard related fixes

- Fixed text selection

- Visual indication of input mode also for non-latin input modes

- General bug fixing (stability, UI)



Windows Mobile

- keypad/smartphone support

- Flash Lite 3.1 support (disabled by default)

- BIDI support also for language extensions

- phone numbers in plain text are converted to links

- support for background sound

- general bug fixing (stability, UI)



Known issues include:



Both:

- Opera Link: Bookmarks saved in Beta 2 are lost when upgrading to Beta 3

- Hotmail does not work, please use the mobile version "www.hotmail.com/m"

- Dragonfly - need to do ‘connect’ two times in a row to get a connection working



S60:

- After permanently accepting an untrusted certificate, you get an error when trying to load the https:// page again. Workaround: In the S60 device menu go to the Settings -> General -> Security -> Certificate Management -> Trusted site certificates and delete the certificate for the problematic site



Windows Mobile:

- Flash is only a preview/in alpha state, expect instabilities, performance degradation during use

- Flash is only supported on touch devices

- Need to double-click on Flash content to view it in full-screen, another double-click to return

- right-to-left support is not complete in the UI

- On certain WM5 Smartphone/WM6 Standard devices, the dictionary is not disabled in the password field

- Unable to type special characters on Moto Q9

- Certain HTC devices with TouchFLO will force Opera back to portrait mode if visiting home screen when Opera is in landscape

- Some input method editors are known not to work well with Opera because they do not comply with Microsoft’s SIP and/or IME standard. When such an editor is detected by Opera, Opera will use a known (default) input method instead. An exception is EzInput v1.5, where the phone keypad and compact QWERTY, ABC mode doesn’t work, but the rest of the modes work fine. We recommend upgrading to EzInput v2.0 to avoid this.

Yesterday afternoon the global Opera Mini cluster was upgraded to version 4.15.2444. The main improvements include

• better support for sms:, smsto:, mmsto: and mailto:
  
  
• improved reliability of synchronization using Opera Link
  
  
• many patches improving site compatibility
  
  
• fix for an issue related to progressive loading
  
  
• better support for Mini 5’s download manager
  
  
• fix for some "clicking just reloads page" problems
  
  
• fix for unicode problems in regular expressions
  
  

Unfortunately, server-side support for password auto-completion had to be temporarily disabled.

We are happy to announce that Opera Mini 5 beta 2 is now available in the following languages:

• Bulgarian
  
• Croatian
  
• Czech
  
• Danish
  
• Dutch
  
• English (British)
  
• English (International)
  
• English (US)
  
• Finnish
  
• French
  
• German
  
• Greek
  
• Hungarian
  
• Indonesian
  
• Italian
  
• Norwegian
  
• Polish
  
• Portuguese
  
• Romanian
  
• Russian
  
• Slovak
  
• Slovenian
  
• Spanish
  
• Swedish
  
• Turkish
  
• Ukrainian
  

To download Opera Mini 5 beta 2 in one of these languages, delete your current installation and visit http://m.opera.com/next using your phone’s native browser.

Known issues:

• In some languages, long words may overlap in parts of the user interface.
  

As always, we welcome your feedback in our forum, and please report any bugs in our bug report wizard. Thanks!

We are working hard to provide more languages, so don’t worry if your language is not yet listed! :yes:

Best regards,
The Opera Mini team

This afternoon, the Mini servers were upgraded to 4.14.1186 to further
improve site compatibility and inform Mini 5 Beta 1 users about the
availability of the second Beta. Moreover, the synchronization of
speed dials for Mini 4 clients was fixed and the handling of login
dialogs using placeholders for password fields improved. :yes:

We get quite a few questions about the difference between Opera Mini 5 and Opera Mobile 10. This post will attempt to clarify.

NB! Unless you have a Windows Mobile or Symbian/S60 phone, Opera Mobile is not available for you to download to your phone. Enjoy Opera Mini!

First, here is what they have in common:

• Both are based on the same core technology, the Opera Presto browser engine (just like Opera for desktop).
  
• Both use the same cross-platform user interface, providing similar features and browsing experience.
  

And the difference:

• In Opera Mini, the Opera Presto browser engine is located on a server. In Opera Mobile, it is installed on your phone. …

We get quite a few questions about the difference between Opera Mobile 10 and Opera Mini 5. This post will attempt to clarify.

NB! Unless you have a Windows Mobile or Symbian/S60 phone, Opera Mobile is not available for you to download to your phone. Enjoy Opera Mini!

First, here is what they have in common:

• Both are based on the same core technology, the Opera Presto browser engine (just like Opera for desktop).
  
• Both use the same cross-platform user interface, providing similar features and browsing experience.
  

And the difference:

• In Opera Mini, the Opera Presto browser engine is located on a server. In Opera Mobile, it is installed on your phone.
  

When you enter a Web address in Opera Mobile, the Web page is fetched directly from the Web server to your phone. However, the Opera Mini client sends a request to the Opera Mini server, which downloads the page from the Internet. The server then transcodes the page before it is forwarded to the client in a lightweight mark-up language designed specifically for this purpose.

The advantage is that the Opera Mini client can be much smaller and work on more basic phones than the full Opera Mobile browser.

On the other hand, Opera Mini depends on a server while Opera Mobile does not. (Opera Turbo is an optional service for Opera Mobile that compresses Web pages and makes it cheaper to browse, but it is not required).

In practical terms, here is what that means for you:

• Opera Mobile will render Web pages just like a desktop browser. In Opera Mini, there may be slight differences, and very complex Web pages may not work optimally.
  
• Opera Mini will generally be faster. It downloads less content and requires less CPU to render pages.
  
• Opera Mini works on almost any phone. Opera Mobile is only available for Windows Mobile and Symbian/S60 phones.
  

Which product is best for you depends on your personal preferences and the sites you browse. Many advanced users will have both browsers installed and alternate depending on the situation. For example, they will use Opera Mobile when on Wi-Fi, Opera Mini when on a cellular network.

Another reason why Opera Software has both products in the portfolio is that many of our operator and handset manufacturer customers have very specific requirements. The differences between the products may be extremely important to them. For example, Opera Mobile is generally preferred by handset manufacturers for preinstallation on mobile phones.

Today we release a new beta of Opera Mobile 10. And for both Windows Mobile and Symbian/S60 at the same time! Our new cross-platform UI framework enables us to provide the same features and browsing experience on both platforms. Read more on www.opera.com/mobile. Or download it at www.opera.com/mobile/download/.

The main improvements from the previous betas are:

Both:

• Opera Link
  
• Download manager
  
• UI is more finger-friendly on touch devices
  
• Possible to manage search engines
  
• Opera remembers page position and zoom state when moving in history
  
• Column snapping also on touch
  
• Better memory management
  
• Fix for mobile view crash
  
• Start page available from touch menu
  
• Lots of minor bug fixes
  
• Clear cache setting
  

Windows Mobile (only):

• Asks whether to set Opera as default browser on install
  
• Fix for crash on startup (occurred on some devices due to encoding in bookmarks that were imported)
  
• Shortcut support
  

Known issues include:

S60:

• To view Asian languages Web pages you must download the "International version". This includes extra fonts which take approx 3Mb space after installation. See this blog post for more information.
  
• Only phones with Asian language packs will show Asian characters in the user interface (bookmarks etc)
  
• Known exceptions: Thai, Hindi (no support for Thai, Hindi glyphs in UI elements regardless of build used)
  
• Only partial IME (Input Method Editor) support
  
• Soft keyboard is shown even though hard keyboard is slid out and in use
  
• Canceling a connection request does not work (dialogue will pop up again indefinitely)
  
• Crash if you use system edit (platform input method) instead of default on facebook.com (probably also other sites)
  
• No plug-in support (e.g. Flash)
  
• You must click connect twice to use Opera Dragonfly
  

Windows Mobile:

• Non-Touch devices are not supported (Smartphone profile)
  
• No plug-in support (e.g. Flash)
  
• Some input method editors â??IMEâ? (hard and soft phone keyboards) are known not to work well with Opera because they do not comply with Microsoft’s SIP and/or IME standard. When such an editor is detected by Opera, Opera will use a known (default) input method instead. An exception is EzInput v1.5, where the phone keypad and compact QWERTY, ABC mode doesn’t work, but the rest of the modes work fine. We recommend upgrading to EzInput v2.0 to avoid this.
  
• Many IME’s (Input Method Editor) will override the Opera shortcuts
  
• Certain HTC devices with TouchFLO will force Opera back to portrait mode if visiting home screen when Opera is in landscape.
  
• On older WM 5.0 Devices with 480×800 resolution, switching between portrait and landscape may cause display errors. This is due to lack of support for this resolution in early versions of Microsoft’s driver.
  
• You must click connect twice to use Opera Dragonfly
  

Finally, Opera Mini 5 beta 2 is here! …