Yesterday saw the launch of Opera Mini 4.2 for Android. We used to get pretty jazzed whenever there was a release of Opera Mini, especially in the days where we were stuck using Windows Mobile. Now that Android is out and offers a great web browser, we’re not so excited.
There’s nothing wrong with Opera Mini 4.2 by any means. It’s a beautiful, somewhat intuitive web browser that renders pages very fast. The problem is, so does the out of the box client that’s built around Webkit. Maybe it’s the sites we visit, but we haven’t come across anything yet that’s wowed us with Opera Mini.
Maybe we got spoiled over the last month but it seems to us that Opera makes us jump through a couple of extra hoops to get a similar experience. While we naturally wanted to just start typing a web address to go to, we had to click menu, then the tab for typing addresses. Then we could type the URL. Not terrible, just inconvenient.
If we hadn’t grown so accustomed to the built-in browser we’d probably like Opera Mini 4.2 a little more. In the end, it is an excellent web client that loads pages efficiently. If you are brand new to Android and haven’t had much experience with the internet on the G1, give this one an equal look.
