Hands-on with the Opera Mini 5 beta browser for Android

Opera Mini 5 beta hit the Android Market this morning, and we've been putting it through its paces. It's important to remember that this is Opera Mini, not the Opera Mobile we saw at Mobile World Congress, and the two behave differently.

Opera Mini features data compression on the server side, which means it's fast. Very fast. It will load almost anything faster than a standard mobile browser, so there's almost no point in comparing the two (we don't bother in this hands-on). Also remember that this is beta software, so bugs are likely. And, no, there's no Flash support, and no multitouch. But everything ran pretty smoothly in our brief testing. Check it out after the break.

Phil Nickinson