I finally got to installing Opera 8.5 Beta 2 for Windows Mobile Pocket PC. It’s an excellent mobile browser: lightweight, fast, simple. Not to mention powerful.
There are, from what I can tell, two modes of display for Opera Mobile: fit to screen, which probably utilizes Opera’s Small Screen Rendering (SSR) technology, and loading the full page, which churns out results strikingly similar to those of a full desktop browser. It’s amazing how much is condensed into this blazingly fast little browser, which weighs in an anorexic 6MB when installed. And it’s only a beta (which is surprisingly stable - more so than Pocket IE).
Naturally, I took the browser for a spin on quite a few websites. If you want to see how a page appears on the mobile version of Opera, use Opera for the desktop and press Shift-F11. This’ll turn on the Small Screen Rendering mode.
If you haven’t tried out MSN Mobile’s PocketPC start page yet, you should, at least if you have an MSN passport account. It’s really useful, and well-designed for mobile devices. It works flawlessly in Pocket IE (one of the rare few, no doubt helped by being run by MSN), and with a minor formatting glitch in Opera mobile’s SSR mode. This does not affect the page’s efficacy in any way though.
The services on offer, especially the new betas Live Mail and Live Search, are great mobile tools - I guess the numbers next to the links are for cellphone users’ convenience. I want to know why I can use Live Mail on my PocketPC but not on my desktop (they didn’t allow me into the beta test because of locale).
Google’s mobile tools are not as impressive nor as comprehensive. I wonder why there are two (very similar) search pages: here (the ‘XHTML’ one), and here (the ‘PDA’ one). Regardless, I’m using the XHTML one because it looks better in Opera - in fact, it’s my homepage. The ‘mobile web’ search in the XHTML one is kinda useful - for cellphone users. Opera’s good enough to surf real websites, not only mobile WAP ones.
Mobile GMail is not as well designed as Windows Live Mail - it’s a tad messier. But it does include a ’search mail’ feature, just like its big dadddy on the desktop. Nifty. Google includes a mobile version of News and its Personalized Homepage for measure, too.
I’m guessing gada.be to be some sort of result hashing service using RSS feeds from various sources, notably MSN search, Flickr, Technorati, etc. You know, the Web 2.0 gang. Anyway, it works really well on a mobile device, most probably due to its already spartan design, which I think scales down even further on a small screen - for example, no ads. It’s a convenient way to get information from a variety of sources, which doesn’t exclude the blogosphere like normal search engines, quickly. However, sometimes the results seem to get stuck loading - maybe a glitch or lag in the RSS retrieval?
All these are great sites and should add another dimension to my mobile web browsing experience, especially when I’m using such a great browser as Opera on my PocketPC.
Tags: Opera, PocketPC, Pocket PC, Mobile, MSN, Google, gada.be
