Fortissimo! Opera Mini 4.2 browser released, with beta version for Android

Opera today release version 4.2 of its Opera Mini Web browser, designed specifically for mobile phone platforms. The Norwegian company also unveiled the first beta version of Mini 4.2 for the Android mobile phone operating system. The beta can be downloaded to T-Mobile’s G1 smartphone, the first and so far only commercial Android product. It’s the first Opera Mini is used by at least some 21 million users worldwide, who downloaded five billion Web pages just in October, according to Opera’s latest Web report. Its popularity is due in part to being designed to run on a wide array of mobile phones, not just the high-end smartphones, and because of well-designed UI. The separate Opera Mobile browser is designed for higher-end mobile devices. The public beta of version 9.5 was released this past summer. Opera Mobile is a full-blown Web browser that displays a complete Web page on the mobile device screen. Then (like Opera Mini) it lets users easily zoom in and out, and navigate quickly around it. The beta release also offered a simplified UI and speedier performance. The new version of Opera Mini, which was first introduced for lower-end mobile phones in 2006, supports additional languages, over 90 in all, and new ‘skins’ to let users change the mobile browser’s appearance. The browser compresses data before it’s sent to the phone. The browser includes Opera Link support for notes, so users can synchronize some information between the PC and Opera Mini. For the new version, Opera also improved the real time streaming protocol (RTSP) handoff to optimize mobile video performance. You can find the 4.2 code at: http://www.opera.com/mini/ Better browsing on handhelds is one of the hottest areas in mobile computing. You can improve your use of the Web just by downloading a better designed Web browser. But there are other steps users can take to make the Web more truly mobile: a full QUWERTY keyboard can help, a good download manager, and finding “mobilized” versions of favorite sites.