Opera Mini finds its way onto Android

Got Android and lack lovely browsing experience? No worries, Opera mini is coming here to help. Opera's Chris Mills explains that rather than start from scratch they've used the existing code base and binary package with a wrapper that converts the Java ME API calls to Android API calls -- think translator. Of course, this has all only been run in software so far, though we just know now that it's hitting the wild, you can be sure that people playing with early hardware are going to be all over this. We love Opera Mini and are pretty stoked about Android, too, so you go gents, make us proud.

[Via PhoneScoop]

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 11th 2008 6:58PM]

This is such vapor ware.

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 11th 2008 7:22PM]

you guys really like opera mini that much? i absolutely hate it. it constantly resets itself, losing all my bookmarks and rss feeds. I got so fed up with it doing that, sometimes multiple times in a day, that I went back to the awful P-IE. On top of that, I know it goes through Opera's minimizing proxy server but sometimes I wouldnt be able to get into a site for hours at a time while I could switch over to P-IE and it would load fine. at least P-IE doesnt reset all my settings like opera mini does. 3 was decent but 4 is dreadful. (running on WM 5.1, btw)

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 11th 2008 7:47PM]

You've got to make sure you exit the program through the program and not ending it externally you can say. It used to do that to me because on my "dumb" phone I would hit end to close the app, instead now I actually hit Exit within the App. It was suggest on the opera mini site.

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 11th 2008 11:32PM]

thanks for that tip, i'll try it the next time I muster up the courage to give it another go.

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 11th 2008 8:01PM]

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


Get firefox mini working on it! DO NOT USE OPERA!!!

good lord, do you people learn NOTHING from other people's mistakes??

1) Don't use Opera
2) Don't use IE-Mobile
3) goto 1

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 11th 2008 9:21PM]

Skyfire beats all of the above.

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 11th 2008 11:31PM]

i wouldnt know. i signed up for the beta and I still havent heard from them. And it was really early in the signup too, but I know they said they are staging it out incrementally...

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 11th 2008 10:58PM]

Whoa, when did the trolls decide to pop in?

Anyways, glad to see Opera Mini on Android. Skyfire and Minimo are going to be great competitors in the mobile browser market, and I hope to see lots of great new features come out because of it.

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 12th 2008 1:03AM]

Hmm, Android already has Webkit built in. which is basically to Mobile Safari. Which is already better then Opera. Add in the fact that wrappers slow down performance... and you're running something that's NOT a native app.

And you wanna talk Vaporware.. FireFox Mini is vaporware. But i bet it'll do the best it can to emulate Safari Mobile.

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 12th 2008 2:09AM]

no no. I'm saying that Android itself is vaporware. it's ridiculous. all of this hype over yet another linux-based mobile OS. it's just annoying.

and JAVA??? give me a BREAK!

i'm sorry, just a little frustrated.

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 12th 2008 9:27AM]

While it's early-stage, I don't think I'd call MiniMo vaporware.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080409-first-look-mozilla-fennec-targets-handheld-browser-market.html

The mobile browser space is gonna be a lot of fun, I think

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 13th 2008 4:19PM]

The J2ME to Android Java wrapper is probably pretty thin, and I doubt it makes much difference in performance. Also, how is this not a "native" app? Android's API is Java, so a "native" app would be running on the same JVM as this, just using different APIs.