Opera Mini Beta 4.2 is Pretty Good on Blackberry 7100t

You might imagine I was one of those early adopters waiting on line overnight for an iPhone on the day of its release. Well, as an Apple user for some time now, I have learned that it's good to let the real early adopters have their fun and work out the kinks for you... and then buy at least a second revision of the product.

Having given up the Sidekick a while ago, I have been using an "old" Blackberry 7100t. It's a great tool for email and for keeping up on basic blogs with the BB browser.

Until some future generation of smartphone comes out (I've been keeping an eye on what's coming) I will likely stick with the Blackberry. It supports J2ME, allowing newer applications (Google Maps, Gmail Mobile, various RSS readers) to be installed rather painlessly and then run cheaply on T-Mobile's inexpensive data plans.

Which brings me to the point of this post: Ditch the Blackberry browser and head on over to opera.com so you can try out the Opera Mini beta. Opera Mini is up to version 4 now and it's quite nice. Scrolling is supported on the numeric keypad, and has a special mode which allows you to zoom in and out on different regions of the page. Currently landscape mode browsing is not supported on the 7100t... I wonder if they will get that working in the future.

Opera Mini appears to support some light AJAX scripting but a quick test on www.goodsearch.com with its relatively simple charity selector component did not yield very good results.

But what does one expect in the way of AJAX on a mobile device? I suppose iPhone with its full Safari browser sets the new gold standard in this area - even Netsuite encourages users to take their business moble with the iPhone.

Still, the enhanced scrolling characteristics alone make Opera Mini 4.2 Beta worth living through some of the kinks. Give it a try!