New Opera makes music on cell phones

Opera has announced a major new version of their web browser for mobile phones. Dubbed Opera Mini 3.0, the new version is available as a free download from the Opera web site. The new browser works with a variety of phones (a complete list is available at the site) and can be downloaded in three ways: as an SMS attachment, a WAP download, or downloaded to the user's PC and then transferred over via Bluetooth or USB attachment. The download comes in the form of a Java-based application separated into .jar and .jad files.

Opera Mini comes in two different versions to accomodate phones with different hardware resources. New features in Mini 3.0 include an RSS reader, HTTPS support for secure web sites, the ability to share photos taken by the camera, and a content-folding feature that compresses long menus to a [+] button that can be expanded as necessary. The company has set up a remote server that preprocesses web pages, compressing the content before it is sent to the phone. This makes browsing faster and lowers bandwidth charges. Opera claims that Mini 3.0 is even faster at rendering pages than the previous version.

Its small size, modest hardware requirements, standards compatibility, and raw speed have won it much critical acclaim, but the browser has not met with much success on the desktop—most web surveys put its usage at around 1 percent, compared with 10-12 percent for Firefox and 80-odd percent for Internet Explorer. The folks at Opera have decided to focus on the embedded market for their future growth, and have already scored deals with Nintendo to provide a browser for the DS and Wii game consoles (the latter is not available just yet).