Opera Mini 5 Brings Support For Touch ScreensOpera Mini 5 Brings Support For Touch Screens

Opera Software lifted the curtains on Opera Mini 5 Beta, a brand-new version of the browser for mobile phones. Aside from a refreshed design, the biggest new features for this version of Opera Mini are support for touch screen devices and a more usable Speed Dial tool.Opera Mini has long been a capable browser for mobile devices. Its ability to compress data has surely saved me hundreds of dollars when roaming overseas. The new features make a good thing even better. Here's what's improved.

Touch Support

Let touch phone users rejoice! This is an over-due improvement for Opera Mini. Opera has added full touch phone support to Mini, which means devices such as the BlackBerry Storm can take advantage of this better browser. Opera has added on-screen navigation tools that are finger friendly, and includes support for kinetic scrolling.

Speed Dial

On the desktop version of Opera, Speed Dial is a set of visual bookmarks that let users quickly jump to any of their favorite nine Web sites from a rich graphical interface. On Opera Mini, the Speed Dial has been a simple list of links. Rather boring.

Now, Opera Mini 5 Beta brings the desktop version of Speed Dial to mobile phones. Opera will even suggest bookmarks based on users' browsing history.

Tabbed Browsing

Tabbed browsing is probably my favorite feature of modern browsers, both on the desktop and on the mobile phone. Opera Mini 5 Beta adds support for tabbed browsing. This means users can have multiple windows open at a time and bounce back and forth quickly.

Password Manager

Password management is more and more important these days as users have multiple accounts, networks and communities to manage from their devices. Opera Mini 5 Beta includes a password manager that will remember and store passwords on the phone, making sign-ins much less painful.

The new version of Opera Mini 5 is available starting today.