Opera Software are a lesser known but nonetheless well established web browser software maker. Their recent release of Opera Mini, a free browser for mobile phones caught my eye. This is a particularly useful bit of software if you regularly use your mobile phone on the relatively slow GPRS  mobile internet. What's interesting is that when you visit a website using the brwoser the content is first cached to Opera's server where it is compressed before transmission to your phone where the browser then makes a remarkably good attempt at rendering quite complex pages on the small screen. Compression speeds up transmission and the rendering capabilities means it's possible to view sites on your mobile that lesser browsers can't manage. Installation of Opera Mini has also been made simple, with a number of options including simply sending a text from your phone to trigger the installation.

Opera mini is a Java application and will probably install and load on most phones with Java support. On older phones (older than 2 or 3 years) usefulness is limited as many sites require more memory than is available 

It seemed to work well in my tests. The browser does take a few seconds to load and  on my phone I need to find a way to integrate the browser into the menu system. Note: it's a web browser not a WAP browser so doesn't cope well with WAP sites.

Opera also make browsers for PDA's and PC's. Find out more here. 

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