Video: Beta of Opera's new mini-browser (hints of Safari on iPhone?)

Usually, when you go to an event like Digital Life (like I did last week in NYC), you get to see lots of gadgets and games. But browser software? Yes indeed. As I and my one-man multimedia crewman Matt Conner walked the show floor, we came across a small booth that was occupied by Opera, the browser people.

In it (Opera's booth), Opera communications manager Thomas Ford was showing off the latest beta of Opera Mini -- a browser that targets cell and smart phones. As you can see in the video, the main new feature of Opera Mini is its ability to show a Web page as it would be laid out on a PC's display, but in a somewhat compressed format. He calls this the "PC-View." So compressed that is that it's hard, if not impossible, to read what some of the text on the page actually says. Even so, once you're looking at the layout, you can select regions of the page to magnify at which point, you get a much better close up of the text. My sense is that if you were to take the way Safari works on the iPhone and do your best to mimic it on other cell phones, this new version of Opera Mini is what it would look like.

Just the existence of Opera Mini says something about the quality of browser that cell phone manufacturers and carriers are offering in their wares. I for one have found that the browser built into the copy of Windows Mobile 5 on my Motorola Q (there are still only three or four phones on the US market running WM6) to be completely lacking when it comes to accessing certain Web sites. For example, with Javascript becoming more prevalent on popular Web pages, you'd think that most mobile browsers would be supporting it by now. The one in my Q doesn't and sadly, neither does the new beta version of Opera Mini (at least according to company officials). Built-in support for PDF files (I know this normally requires a plug-in) is another feature I'd like to see. With so many pages on the Web being PDF-formatted, not being able to see them through my mobile browser is a bit of a pain.

Ford also points out that Opera hasn't gotten its mini browser to work on phones from Verizon Wireless (another bummer since that's my carrier).

Anyway, check out the video. It's a quickie since the new feature in the Opera Mini Beta doesn't take long to cover.