Hands-On With Opera Mini 5 For AndroidHands-On With Opera Mini 5 For Android

Today Opera Software made its Opera Mini 5 browser available to the Android platform for the first time. As with its performance on the iPhone, Opera Mini 5 is much faster on Android handsets than the native Android browser.Opera has been debuting Opera MIni 5 on pretty much every platform out there, so it was only a matter of time before the browser reached Android handsets. Opera Mini compresses the heck out of mobile data (Opera says by 90%), which lets data transit the mobile network faster and reach the handset sooner. Opera Mini is a proxy-based browser, meaning Opera's servers do all the heavy lifting remotely and then push the final results to the Android device. I downloaded the browser on two different handsets -- Motorola Droid and HTC myTouch 3G -- and put it through its paces.

From a user interface perspective, it is nearly identical to the other versions of Opera Mini and offers the same feature set. It includes Speed Dial, tabbed browsing, password manager and bookmark syncing. The UI is clean, stark and easy enough for any user to figure out after a few moments of fiddling around. There are five software buttons along the bottom of the screen, letting user navigate back, forward, reload the page, sort through tabs or open the settings menu.

Perhaps the best feature is the tabs tool. Rather than minimize the current web page as the native browser does, it shows the open tabs along the bottom in the appearance of a deck of cards. You can shuffle through the open tabs without leaving your current web page. I like that a lot.

The real killer feature of the browser, however, is its speed. Opera Mini 5 loads web sites dramatically faster than both the native Android browser and the Dolphin browser on both the Droid and the myTouch 3G. As on the iPhone, Opera Mini 5 for Android loads the full HTML version of many web sites faster than the Android browser can load the mobile-optimized versions.

Don't take my word for it, though. The software is a free download. I encourage any and all Android users to at least check it out.