Installation is very quick, as it's only a 100K application (remember that most of the processing power is back in Scandinavia, in Opera's proxy server). To get started with Opera Mini, you just go to and the server auto-detects your device and gives you the right download link.

Not every site will work perfectly, though, I couldn't bring up Microsoft's front page, but then that may have been intentional by the Opera crowd.!

I tried out a few online shopping and banking sites and each seemed to be perfectly usable in Opera Mini, which was impressive, considering the three way connection via the proxy server. For example, 300K of CNN.com's front page was reduced to just 30K when downloaded and viewed in Opera Mini. The benefit for you and I is that pages load faster (even allowing for up to 10 seconds a time while the proxy goes off and grabs each page for processing) and that the hit on your GPRS bill is drastically reduced. Essentially, you open your next link or type in your next URL and the server grabs it and all its code and images, decides which bits you don't need and sends over just the bits you do. With Opera Mini (a free Java-based application), they've gone all out to put as much processing power as possible on the proxy server. In addition, the full byte count for each page was still transmitted, even if the smartphone had no use for acres of Javascript, Flash and the like. This wasn't terribly successful for many pages, usually because the size of the HTML wasn't the largest factor in page load times. Instead, many manufacturers and developers seem to want to cling to the 'try to display a page as closely as possible to a desktop view', even though a page designed for a 1200 pixel wide PC screen is never going to be practical on a PDA or smartphone, even with the 640 pixel width of the Nokia Communicator.Įnter Opera, who'd toyed with using proxy-based compression in their Opera Mobile Accelerator product, designed to compress HTML pages during transmission and expand them on the device. There have been several attempts at this in the wider PDA world, without it ever really taking off. The idea of using a 'proxy', a web server somewhere else in the world that takes your requests and optimises the results for your device, isn't totally new.

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