Opera Mini finds its way onto Android

by Sean Cooper, posted Apr 11th 2008 at 6:32PM

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]

Filed under: Handsets, Software, Android

Tags: android, browser, opera, opera mini, OperaMini

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Neutral

carlo2 @ Apr 11th 2008 6:58PM

This is such vapor ware.

Neutral

henry @ 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)

Neutral

Gamer90 @ 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.

Neutral

henry @ 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.

Low Ranked

john @ 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

Neutral

WiiTodd @ Apr 11th 2008 9:21PM

Skyfire beats all of the above.

Neutral

henry @ 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...

Neutral

Brian N. @ 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.

Highly Ranked

Duscrom @ 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.

Neutral

carlo2 @ 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.

Neutral

kev @ 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

Neutral

Al @ 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.