Opera Mini 4 (beta 2)

I’ve never been that big of a mobile web guy. I’m never away from my computer long enough that I go into web-withdrawal and need a fix on my cell phone. I dabbled a bit with it when I had a Blackberry 8700, and the experience there wasn’t bad. In fact, I started to get the hang of it, and would frequently be all over Google Maps as I have a horrible sense of direction.

Facebook mobile was nice — but really, I’m on Facebook about once a week now — so really, what’s the point?

The biggest problem, for me, is that the data plans in Canada amount to highway robbery. The carriers still clock your data usage in megabytes. Now that I’m paying my own cell phone bill, if I’m not really careful, that can come back to bite you in the arse. I think I would be a pretty big Backpack user if it didn’t cost me my first born child to log on.

For my limited use, the built-in browsers on mobile devices are okay. They don’t feel quite like the web, but that’s fine, they’re good enough. I was awfully intrigued when I saw Safari mobile on the iPhone though — I imagine with a setup like that, I’d routinely be exceeding my data quota in a month (and that’s the reason I won’t get an iPhone and unlock it right now).

I’ve managed to come part of the way though with Opera 4 Mini. It actually feels like the web, even on the tiny screen of my Sony Ericsson W810i. I read that it’s the same rendering engine as being used on the Nintendo Wii (which, overall I’ve been pretty impressed with). Landscape mode looks and feels great, and the interface is responsive and works just as you’d expect it to. I fired up a couple of web sites, and they rendered exactly as expected (and I know for a fact that they don’t have fancy handheld-specific CSS). Obviously some of the hot Web 2.0 jazz doesn’t function (AJAX) — but hey, that’s okay, with my 2MB per month transfer limit, I don’t think I’d like a lot of behind-the-scenes transfer taking place.