Gadgetory

hey guys its brand a minimun from pocketnow.com and in this video we're taking a look at the new version of opera mini version 5 which is in beta right now Opera Mini is one of the few mobile browsers that use a server-side rendering meaning when you call out for a web site at first goes through the server of opera gets compressed and sent down to your device so it really speeds up page rendering it's very close and functionality to skyfire in fact we are going to compare the two mobile browsers in a few minutes to see which one is actually faster so let's start by turning on upper mobile 9.5 it's a java application so it loads first in the midlet manager so i'm going to go to opera mini 5 beta and it takes a fair amount of time to start up being a beta okay so that took about 20 25 seconds which is a little bit too long for a mobile browser but again it's in beta it's not quite finished now the first view we get is very reminiscent of Google Chrome so we have a bunch of thumbnails of websites that we visit on a regular basis and of course you can press on one of these tiles to add or you can dial into one of them let's go to Wikipedia and take a look at what that looks like we get a little message here saying you sure you want to use data I'm going to click yes and then it's off right now we're using an evdo connection at about half strength so it's not as fast as it could be but it's still a 3g connection so as you can see it came in very fast here scrolling and panning around the page is very fast you can double tap to zoom and although sometimes it doesn't quite work let me give it a try here now you see sometimes it doesn't work let me try again over here which is probably one of the bugs in the beta it does work in landscape and it flips over the landscape very fast but unfortunately for devices that have slide out keyboards or at least the HTC touch pro you can't use the hardware keyboard only the on-screen keyboard so let's do some speed tests and see how fast opera mini five takes to alert load certain pages so we're going to sweat bet switch back to portrait and get a stopwatch over next to the touch pro and we're start off by going to pocketnow.com and here's the on-screen keyboard it's pretty good it's nice nicely sized and of course the text is very small on the screen you can actually make adjustments to that and I'm going to tap on the first entry here and try to hit start at the very same time if that's possible and we're trying to go at the same time ready set go and here it comes at about 18 seconds a little bit on the slow side of course we can pan around the page the rendering is very good what's really interesting about opera mini five is that going back to the previous page for some reason is very very fast watch this you can kind of flip between pages at a very rapid velocity and I've tested this with multiple web pages each time it goes back very fast let's test with another website let's go to engadget this time and we're going to reset all right we're gonna hit go at the same time ready set go and there it comes in one quick burst at about 17 or 18 seconds again not as fast as it could be I think skyfire is probably going to beat it but the rendering fidelity is fantastic you can get around on the screen very easily and everything looks great once it comes through there are some settings in opera mini five and if you notice the bottom bar here it's very reminiscent of opera mobile 9.5 that is pre-loaded onto a lot of windows mobile devices now so we can tap on the little wrench here and get some settings very easy to use interface and we can actually have multiple tabs open by clicking on this area we can press + and go to say you know BBC News or any other web page or enter a URL ok so let's take a look at how fast skyfire is we looked at two pages both of them came through in about 17 seconds wasn't amazing certainly a little bit faster than Opera Mobile 9.5 so here we are in sky fire and let's go to pocketnow.com not configured as your default browser we'll skip that and to be fair I'm going to use the on-screen keyboard here it goes and we're going to try to get this the same time ready set go against sky fire is also using server side rendering to pull down the page a little bit faster than you would get with a standard browser like opera mobile 9.5 or pocket Internet Explorer and here it is in about 13 seconds and we get some instructions on the screen that kind of comes up in the first time set up very similar in terms of how the page renders very good double tap to zoom in kind of thing let's take a look at how fast it brings up engadget ok here we go and ready set go and it's done in about 20 seconds a little bit slower than opera mini yet I think that has to do with the slow EVD connection that I'm on right now it's not at full strength so overall opera mini five really is the potential to replace sky fires the fastest windows mobile browser this test was a little bit flawed because we're using kind of a slow evdo network we don't have a full signal up here but you can see by the interface and the way that opera mini allows you have multiple pages open and quickly access your favorites that it really is the potential to be an awesome windows mobile browser and we're looking forward to future betas and the final release of opera mini when it becomes available and works the way it should for example the of course hardware keyboard doesn't work on this particular device so follow us on Twitter for more on the latest in windows mobile browsers twitter.com slash pocket Nell tweets that's it for now