Opera Mini, particularly when used under a decent MIDlet manager, has always been one of the best choices for the Web browsing on any current handset. The new beta version of the forthcoming, 4-series Opera Mini, exactly two months after the last beta (see THIS) has just been released, and boasts a lot of goodies.
Getting it is done the same as before: navigate to HERE with either a mobile browser (or a WAP-capable desktop one, if you’re ready to transfer the JAR file to your handset in a way explained in the MIDlet Bible), click the link in the middle of the page and it’ll be automatically downloaded and deployed. After that, you can start it in the same way as other MIDlets (or, with Symbian, other programs).
1. Most important bugfixes: cookies, fonts
First and foremost, the cookie problems have all been fixed. These, in the previous, version 2 beta, caused a lot of problems under the, otherwise, excellent and most recommended Windows Mobile Esmertec Jbed MIDlet manager, along with a lot of non-Windows Mobile platforms. These problems are all gone – I’ve never encountered any cookie problem with any sites I use under the most common Windows Mobile MIDlet managers (IBM J9, TAO, Esmertec Jbed). The same (no cookie problems at all) stands for the Symbian-based Nokia N95, Nokia’s current “consumer” flagship model.
Second, some of the font problems have also been fixed. For example, beta2 was unable to render bold typeface with “extra large” characters and, in general, there was abolutely no support for different character sizes in, for example, headers. These problems have all been fixed. For example, as far as the bold + largest font size combination is concerned, see THIS screenshot (showing bold works with the largest chars). When it comes to different font sizes (headers etc), with my standard charsize test page, the tests resulted in excellent results (the following three screenshots have all been taken on a QVGA WM2003 HP iPAQ h2210 running the current (6.1.1) version of IBM J9; as can be seen, there’s no font smoothing with the smallest fonts under J9, just like Jblend, and unlike all the other KVM’s): 1 2 3.
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