Many TamsPalm readers enjoy Opera Mini. I recently found a thread over at 1src’s announcing that Opera Mini 2 works in HiRes+ on Palm handhelds - I tried, it works, and here is my “Opera Mini 2 review”:

Opera Mini is not a regular kind of browser that downloads full HTML files to the handheld - instead, a co-called proxy is connected inbetween the web site and the handheld. This proxy “reduces” the size of the pages so that less data needs to be transferred onto the handheld. However, most of the formatting gets lost. Here are a few commented screenshots:

Pages designed for mobile use(I used Eugenia’s Mobile digg here) look very similar in Opera Mini 2 and Web Pro 3.5:

Binary Clock 3.0’s web site contains tabs - neither Opera Mini 2 nor Web Pro 3.5 can manage that:

Tables get “eliminated”, sort of like Plucker does:

Google AdSense works well - Web Pro does not manage it:

Opera Mini 2 was not excessively stable on my Palm Tungsten T3. I had to set Memory to 8MB and the Thread Cache to 32kb to make it show web sites as whole, and nevertheless experienced a few “freezeups”, some UI quirks and an outright “Java crash”:


The web browser can be downloaded for free here; you need to have Java installed to get it running.

Overall, Opera Mini 2 worked ok on my Palm Tungsten T3. The browser obviously is different from Web Pro and Blazer, as it doesnt even attempt to recreate the original page layout - this reduces data transfer volume and makes browsing hell fast(almost as fast as on my desktop). 5way control works really well too - no need to use the stylus when surfing! If you are on a GPRS contract, look at this free browser - it could save you money!
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