Ever since the Internet has been made available on hand-held devices such as cellphones, PDAs and smart phones, people have been lamenting about how horribly long it takes to open up pages on your phone or how much bandwidth it takes or how they don’t display the pages properly and so on. These days one finds mobile browsers such as the Android browser, Firefox for Mobile, Opera Mobile, Safari on the iPod and iPhone, Skyfire etc which are all quite capable of displaying a web page almost as well as any regular Internet browser.
Opera is one of the top 5 Internet browsers used worldwide and is rapidly gaining market-share in the comparatively new mobile web browsers industry. Opera essentially offers two kinds of web browsers for cellphones, smart phones and PDAs.
The Opera Mini web browser is essentially for simpler phones and gains compatibility for most kinds of phones as it is based on the Java Mobile platform. Opera Mini adds a lot of features over phone browsers that come pre-installed on most such phones, features such as the ability to save web pages on to your phone, ability to download and upload files, faster browsing, synchronized bookmarks, landscape mode etc.
You can download the Opera Mini web browser here.
The Opera Mobile 10 Beta web browser has been long awaited and packs a lot of features available on the PC version of the Opera web browser along with features suited for smartphones and other handheld devices such as auto-rotation for phones that have accelerometers and support the function, touchscreen browsing, etc.
Additionally, features such as Opera Turbo which allows for up to 70% compression of web pages allows you to surf the web faster while also reducing bandwidth usage.
Opera Mobile 10 also boasts tabbed browsing, download manager, visual bookmarks, speed dial, inline editor, etc. Offline browsing of saved pages and images as well as a password manager round off this very feature rich web browser for mobile phones, the Opera Mobile 10.
Although still in beta, the Opera Mobile 10 web browser is available for download and is compatible with Nokia Maemo devices as well as Windows Mobile based phones.
You can also go to the download page for Opera Mobile web browsers directly using your smart phone through the following URL: m.opera.com/mobile.