Yesterday I got to test drive the new Opera Mini 5 on my phone, and I was all praises for it. The touchscreen support was wonderful as well as the new tabbed browsing. There are several improvements over the current version- 4.2, but the most noticeable of course is the looks. Everything is animated that I was almost ready to believe it was not a java app but instead a flash lite. Some degree of transparency is also available to dialog and pop up windows. Personally, I don't like scrolling on touchscreen, I'd much rather prefer to have a hardware directional pads, or an optical directional gadget. But I guess we all are moving into touchscreen era now. The beta was fine with scrolling, not unlike the in-built browser on my test phone-- and LG Viewty. A simple touch was added with the sort of elasticity with scrolling, very much like on iPhone, although it's more kind of a cosmetic addition for me because it does slow down the scrolling a bit. You have to endure this "elastic" scrolling all throughout as it also is present on internal items, like going through the options on the settings. Probably the best improvement for me was the tabbed browsing support. Well, I also use a modded version of Opera Mini, and these for the longest time have had tabbed browsing. The one on the beta version though is quite different by being classy. Touchscreen support is ever present, so intead of just having tabs with names of the pages on it, you get to have block with a thumbnail of the page. This really is a great addition for me as I think visual representations are better than just text descriptions. The tab selector is hidden and comes up only when you touch the tabs icon. The navigation bar that holds the back, forward, refresh, tabs, and settings button can be hidden and can be recalled by pressing a floating transparent icon. I'm not sure if it's a bug or just on my phone, but inline editing seemed to fail sometimes, it only allows me to do offline editing the first time and then refuses to work the next time. Inline editing is done with a pop up QWERTY keyboard, but the vertical orientation provides little space for the keys that it is hard to type texts in. Of course there is a support for landscape, which should give the keys more space, but then this seem to be another bug as the app I got had problems rendering not just the pages but the entire browser on landscape. One thing more that I hope they will add on to the final version, or next beta versions, is the download manager. There already was a download manager on the previous version, but it seems to be missing on the Opera Mini 5 beta. It's never good to take off one other functions to accomodate another. Of course this is just a beta, and for sure the final version will have all these bugs straightened out. I'm positive the final version will come in the next few months, as this beta version was supposed to have been rolled out last year according to some sources.
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