This post is many months delayed as it was originally intended to publish in January, however it still remains true (albeit that the numbers are dated).
This has been a wonderful year for Apps; the Android Market exploded to 200,000 apps as of December 28; the Blackberry App World (of “super apps”) has grown 1,500 apps as of November 30; and the iPhone app store has exploded, passing 325,000 total apps on December 26; in just two months the Windows Phone 7 app ecosystem has bloomed to over 4,000 apps. However there is one common app that I’ve loved on all three platforms:
Opera Mini
Yes, I know, Opera Mini, the staple app from years gone by when “apps” were “applications” and would only run on high-end Nokia phones. Opera Mini does have a long lineage, however it’s essence is what defines it, just like Blackberry is defined by its history as a pager. I should elaborate: Opera Software (company) is based out of Norway that has developed a great internet suite since the ’90s. I have personally enjoyed Opera, and was at its peak on the ’90s when you paid for a browser as you would any software (this is in the days of AOL disks, nearly a decade before Firefox). Today, Opera is mostly known to the masses as the Nintendo DS and Wii browser, and for the surprising approval onto the iOS App Store in April of this year.
I remember in April questioning what the big deal was, having reminisced back to 2005 seeing a Motorola Razr running a “stunning for a mobile phone” web browser; I remember waiting for it to load the Google homepage over 1x for what seemed like forever, only to see that the Google logo had been dramatically compressed, the text box didn’t seem to fit just right, and the fonts had been replaced with 1980s bitmap fonts. Furthermore the idea that the browser was navigated by pressing the directional pad buttons (making the usual for the era slight beeping sound on every key press). Nonetheless I had to see what Apple was fussing about; if the iPhone version resembled this pre-historic attempt at a “browser” then Mobile Safari was in a league of its own.
After many hours of reading about the architecture of Opera Mini I figured it was definitely worth a shot; it seemed that Opera hosted a server farm that would proxy mobile phone traffic by downloading the actual pages, compressing the contents as an image, then transmit the minuscule result to the phone which would run simple rendering software that was aware of text boxes, hyperlinked regions of the page, and other simple HTML controls. Opera had even managed to allow Javascript on-load events to function (under time constraints that delayed page-load), and Javascript on-click events. Impressive; this was definitely worth a look, after my app-free month was up.
The iPhone app downloaded quickly over EDGE, only 980KB, under a megabyte. Within a few seconds of launching Opera Mini initialized and prompted me with the typical Opera homepage with bookmark tiles (aka Speed Dial). I tried loading a simple site that I was familiar with, I loaded the Twitter mobile page for myself. Within three seconds the page had entirely loaded. On EDGE. Wow. The rendering was a little off, and I couldn’t get my login credentials to take (I figured my intricate password of special characters must have disagreed with the proxy form submission page, or perhaps a cut-and-paste error). It seemed every page loaded quickly, like EDGE-on-ecstasy quickly. In the next month I used a fraction of the cellular data I was used to while browsing the internet much more. In my long bus rides to school in the morning I was able to read the usual sites, although some of the sites were butchered (ex Mashable) I still got more out of Opera than I did Safari.
But then tragedy struck and I jumped ship to Android, finding that Opera was exactly the same experience on Android. The idea of this kind of cross-platform browsing intriguing; Webkit may be cross platform, but this was to the next extreme; I imagined Opera licensing their rendering technology to companies that could produce dump clients that browsed entirely through the cloud. The Android client even allows the user to browse with the trackball, in a Blackberry-like fashion, which although against everything I believed at the time as an iPhone user, it was great to read with, navigating a long article without continually stroking the screen.
I then migrated to the Blackberry (OS 4.5) in November; the simple and terrible Blackberry browser reminded me too much of my old LG Keybo’s WAP browser to be comfortable, and Opera Mini was too tantalizing. Yet again, Opera Mini was a great, speedy experience that was able to browse with much better rendering and speed than the stock browser. However I did note a feeling of non-native-ness I suspect it was merely due to the low resources of a 2007-era Blackberry.
It is without hesitation I can recommend Opera Mini to the masses (even the feature-phone wielding amongst them) especially with the $0 price tag. Even on 3G and WiFi Opera seems to always load faster than Safari. Now, if only they made an iPad-optimized version of Opera Mini, eh?