Saturday, August 20, 2005

Opera for Windows Mobile

Surfing on mobile device has several disadvantages. Depending on the your current provider, you may have much less of a speed comparing to your desktop computer with broadband connection. Also, surfing may turn to be expensive. But that is one part of the deal that you can't solve by choosing/upgrading your pocket PC/smartphone. The problem that you can solve is to use some browser which will allow decent view of sites. Current Windows Mobile platform uses browser based on Internet explorer 3, which is fairly obsolete considering its rendering capabilities (BTW even Internet explorer 6 is obsolete in this area, but most people still afraid to brake site compatibility with it), and it usually turns out that you need too much horizontal scrolling. With much more modern rendering engine, Opera is able to show you most of the sites correctly. And you won't have to scroll horizontally anymore. Here are screen shots. I haven't tried it yet, but I think it is still not capable of dealing with most complicated sites like Google maps. But as Minimo, the only current application capable of doing this is still in development phase, it is not thing too worry.