I saw Andrea’s post about Opera Mini 3.0 Beta being out and hopped over to grab it and fool around (beta.mini.opera.com on your mobile browser to download it directly, it installed alongside the 2.0 version instead of over it for me, sweet). It’s cool that Opera is now passing along some device information with the request, but I agree with Andrea that an alternative format is pretty crippling to have to deal with as far as developers are concerned (us at AdMob included).

So I dumped a request sent by Opera Mini 3 to see what was in there:


X-OperaMini-Features: advanced, download, folding, inputhints
X-OperaMini-Phone-UA: NokiaE61-1/3.0 (2.0618.06.05) SymbianOS/9.1 Series60/3.0 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1
X-OperaMini-Phone: Nokia # E61

Which compares with the user agent sent by the services browser on my device:


User-Agent: NokiaE61-1/3.0 (2.0618.06.05) SymbianOS/9.1 Series60/3.0 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1

My guess would be that they just picked out the user agent used by the browser I downloaded with and they’re using that as the original phone UA in the header they pass along. If they had changed or munged the user agent I could see that being an issue, but from what I’ve seen so far it appears to be unaltered. So actually I’m pretty happy about this, there’s something there at least to hold onto, we just need to update some tools to deal with it.