Opera Mini was released today, with a decent amount of info on the entry on the Opera Watch blog:
Opera Mini is a new kind of web browser for virtually all mobile phones and devices. Opera Mini was designed to enable the web on mobile phones that would normally be incapable of running a Web browser. Instead of requiring the phone to process Web pages, Opera Mini uses a remote server to pre-process the page before sending it to the phone, which makes it perfect for phones with very low resources, or low bandwidth connections.
Now, I wouldn’t be too hasty to call server heavy proxy browsing a “new kind of web browser”, but Opera Mini does work out well from what I’ve seen. I got my mits on it a while ago and have generally been pretty impressed with the capability. Most websites look pretty decent, load quickly, and the small font kicks ass. One aspect that I was hoping for was memory savings on my 6680, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. With mini open I can’t really open anything else. But I’ll blame Nokia for that and not Opera. I was also expecting to see AdSense ads rendered in the mobile version, but they seemed to be stripped out all together. It seems like the proxy is executing some javascript based on the sites I’ve seen (granted though I haven’t run an explicit test), and given the Google placement on the default Opera homepage I would have expected to see ads on the results pages. My understanding that the Google setup with Opera was a rev share on ad income. So where’s the ad revenue on a browser that doesn’t display ads?
Russ just pointed me toward his post also, check that out for some additional commentary.
