REVIEW:OPERA MOBILE 11

Smooth Surfing on your Smartphone
Possibly no other browser can run on as many mobiles
as Opera does, but that hasn't stopped Opera
Software from bringing its magic to yet more mobile
devices.
Performance
One of the best things about Opera on Mobile is its
performance, and Opera Mobile 11 continues doing
well in this department, even better than previous
releases despite bringing in new features and a new
engine. Overall the UI seems to just flow a lot more
smoothly than before.
While testing Opera Mobile 11 running an E71 and on
the Samsung Galaxy S, we loaded as many as a
dozen tabs without significant performance drop. Opera
Mobile seems to be doing a good job of conserving
resources, since we noticed that the zooming and
scrolling of a light uncomplicated page was not
impacted by other heavy tabs opened in the
background.
This is especially surprising is that Opera Mobile ships
with essentially the same version of Presto (Opera's
HTML layout engine) as the desktop version! It
supports the same HTML5, CSS3 features (although
stuff like WebM will probably be hardware dependant).
Oddly running HTML5test.com on the Nokia E71
showed that the browser supported WebM, while the
Samsung Galaxy S did not seem to support this. We
tested the browser on a page that included WebM
video, and the E71 just offered support for
downloading the video, no playback. This was quite
expected, as playing back video on a mobile without
hardware acceleration (especially on an aging device
like the Nokia E71) is infeasible.
User Interface
One of the things that immediately strike about Opera
Mobile 11 is tha revamped interface. Of course you
will actually need to experience Opera Mobile 11 and
Opera Mini 6 on other devices before you grasp the
similarities in the interface. Needless to say, someone
who has used Opera Mini / Mobile on one device will
be at ease with Opera running on another device. In
fact this release copies the Opera Menu metaphor from
Opera for desktop by arranging all the features
available in the browser under a menu.
Of course the menu has changed in the transition to
mobile. Instead of a list of menu items, the items
appear as large touch-friendly targets. On non-touch
phones, the UI might have changed to more closely
parallel the touch-screen interface, however the
interaction mechanism remains same, you wont need
to learn new shortcuts. The Opera menu gives access
to the bookmarks, history, the start page, saved
pages, downloads, settings, the find in page feature,
share and help. We will discuss these in more detail
later.
The tab interface too has not changed much since last
time, touch phones have a tab tray that shows the
thumbnails of tabs, while non-touch phones show
desktop-like tabs that can be navigated using your
mobiles navigation keys. The interface does give a
slicker appearance though, especially on non-touch
phones.
The interface is as usual touch-friendly, and with the
new pinch to zoom feature it is even simpler to use the
full web. One of the new features of this release is
improved scrolling performance. While scrolling long
pages, Opera allows you to quickly reach the end by
tapping on a small hovering arrow that points in the
direction of the scroll. This button only seems to
activate on long pages where you'd other wise had to
flick a couple of times to get to where you wanted.
There isn't too much new int he UI expect that it is
uniform across multiple devices and form-factors, which
is all well since it had a good UI to begin with.
Features
Opera 11 includes some great features that make it a
pleasure to use Opera on Mobile. One of these would
have to be Opera Turbo. Opera Turbo, for those who
don't already know about and use it, is a great feature-
cum-service by Opera Software, where the browser
routes web pages through Opera's Turbo servers that
perform a number of optimizations such as decreasing
the size of images, compressing the page overall, and
sending data with fewer requests. The result is a large
savings in data transferred. This means pages load
faster, especially on the poor internet connections we
have here. Additionally this can have a significant
impact on your internet bill if you are baying by the
byte. It is thanks to these Opera servers that Opera
Mini is able to open full-fledged websites even on
devices with too little memory or too many restrictions
to fit a browser engine in.
Opera Link is another one these technologies. It is a
browser sync technology that is native to Opera and
allows one to synchronize their browser experience
across devices. Opera Link is associated with your
Opera account, and lets you use the same Opera
speed dial entries across desktop and mobile, and
ensures that you can access your bookmarks
everywhere no matter whether they are created on
the mobile or desktop.
As with the previous version Opera Mobile
includes a download manager, and has a "Saved
Pages" feature that allows you to download a page
and view it offline later on. Other features such as
finding text in a page working with your bookmarks
and history are supported as usual. What is new
though is a new Share feature.
Smartphones are quickly becoming social tools, and it
is likely that you will be come across something while
browsing that you wish to share with others. Opera
Mobile 11 makes this rather simple, with a new Share
option in the Opera menu. The share option taps into
your mobile's sharing services, so the exact options
available here will depend on what you have installed
on your mobile. However this means it is possible to
share links over Bluetooth or as an SMS.
The settings menu too remains unchanged from last
time. Through the settings menu you can toggle
displaying images, Opera Turbo, Opera Link, Mobile
View, full-screen mode and text wrapping. Text
wrapping is another great feature that ensures that you
don't need to scroll horizontally as you zoom onto text
content on a page by reformatting it to fit the screen
width.
Conclusion
Opera Mobile 11, despite being a major update is not
as significant update as Opera Mobile 10 was. The
changes instead lie inside the core of the browser,
which now has better performance than ever, and
supports the latest standards. Isn't that what people
say they always want? "I wish in the next version
they just improve the performance instead of loading
in useless features. Operas conservative approach with
this upgrade seems to be the right way to go.
The updated engine now makes Opera Mobile one of
the most modern browser available for mobile
platforms. Another "feature" of Opera Mobile 11 is that
it now runs on more devices than ever. This of course
is only something you notice when you have multiple
devices, so perhaps it might not seem so significant.
However if you look at Opera Mobile 11 running on
tablets (you can try the Windows 7 version to have a
preview if you don't own a tablet) you will see that
these are significant changes across platforms,
especially in how the browsers UI adapts to different
resolutions.
That said, we were really expecting Opera to ship this
version with extensions support! It might seem like an
overkill, but since Opera just introduced them in Opera
11 for desktops it seemed like the appropriate time.
Hopefully this is something we can look forward to in
Opera 12 -- or as Opera Software has a penchant for
adding major features in minor version changes, Opera
Mobile 11.1 / 11.5.
Opera Mobile 11 is a browser every smartphone user
must try. The fact that the browser ecosystem is
flooding with more browsers now just goes to show
that there is a demand for alternate browser as the
ones that come pre-installed are not meeting their
needs. With Opera Mobile 11, hopefully your search
will be over.