Last week, at the T-DOSE event, someone told me there's a new version of the Opera browser for my mobile phone. Something with zooming.

Yesterday I downloaded the beta of Opera Mini 4. Strange enough I couldn't download it with my laptop, because there was no link to the beta *.jar. But pointing my old Opera Mini to mini.opera.com/beta showed me a link to get my hands on the latest beta.

After installing, I launched the new Opera. First thing I noticed that it didn't import my bookmarks from the older version I still had installed. No idea if it is possible to do things like that, but it was a bit annoying to enter my bookmarks again.

So, show me that zooming thingy. It seems to work surprisingly well. Most websites are quite wide and don't fit that properly on a mobile's screen. But with this new version, most websites are very easy to read. You highlight a text area you want to read, click, and it zooms in into that area. And you can instantly zoom out with another button. So goodbye to those vertical websites where you had to scroll great portions of a site in order to get to the text you want to read.

It was a bit fiddling though, when and when it doesn't use this way of browsing. It seems Opera detects which sites are too wide and so it switches to the zooming mode. Sites which don't really have a layout, but just text, are automatically zoomed in so you can scroll up and down only.

But for those who don't like this fancy stuff, you can switch back to the old behavior by enabling Fit to width and disabling Auto zoom.

Besides, the new Opera Mini also offers a Landscape mode, but it doesn't seem very practical on a display like I have on my Sony Ericsson K700i. You cannot cram more text on a screen, and you have to switch your mobile vertically whenever you have to fill in some input form.

Another big plus, compared to Opera Mini 3.1, is that you can add your own search engines to the combo box on the start page. I think there are numerous of complaints of people who would like to use Google instead of Yahoo in 3.1. This time, Opera gives you the freedom to do that.

And despite all this new stuff, the browser actually feels much smoother than Opera Mini 3.1.

I don't think there are many downsides, besides the rendering of the websites contains some artifacts. You see some loose pixels or not completely opaque backgrounds of widgets and link highlights. But it's still a beta and I trust the developer team that they will make websites look just as good as in 3.1.

This new version is a big improvement, browsing websites on a small device has never been easier than this.

If you are still not convinced, you can try the online demo at Opera Mini.com.

Update 1 December 2007:

I wrote a follow-up on this entry about the final release of Opera Mini.