Clunky fun with Opera

Opera is shunting out a beta preview of Opera Mini today. It works, so they say in the first line of the press release, on almost every mobile phone. In the last line the company states, “Note that not all features may work on all phones or in all regions.”

Anyway, Opera Mini 4.1 “interacts” with your phone to make browsing more convenient, more productive and more fun. This is a “fun” way of saying that it has auto-complete for URLs and saves pages for offline viewing, so don’t get too excited and start thinking it’ll hook you up with Paris Hilton, Katie Holmes etc… (insert fantasy celebrity of choice).

It’s speedier too by all accounts – up to 50% faster than Opera Mini 4 for some tasks. This one is good too, “Now you never have to leave Opera Mini for your phone's clunky native browser to download images, ringtones and other content, or add attachments to e-mail. Opera Mini handles all of these files.”

Opera is a great company with a great product. But please keep the ‘clunky’ and ‘fun’ elements to a minimum for your next announcement please. Bah humbug.