Jay Eye Sea

Ian Leader: Whilst this might appear to be an overly wild statement I truly believe Android’s open platform has notched one up on the iPhone tonight.  Opera has launched Opera Mini 4.2 for Android (see Android Market) – something that iPhone users will have to wait for – and if reports are to be believed it may be a very long time.  Recent discussions appear to indicate that Apple is more than a  ittle reluctant to let  a rival browser on its precious mobile phone.

But this will be Apple’s loss.  Why?  Because Opera Mini is a very special browser – its not really a browser – it acts as a proxy and Opera’s servers do all the grunt increasing the load speed for web pages – for more details see the Opera site.

But why my excitment?  There are two reasons, both of which make the G1 (and iPhone) more accessible to the masses:

1. For those who don’t have 3G access (like me) this makes the user experience much better; thus making the G1 a real alternative on non 3G networks.

2. But more importantly, I can now use Opera Mini as my default browser and switch to “use only 2G networks” thereby extending the battery life of my G1 – which ironically is more important to iPhone users who can’t “hot swap” out their batteries.

Whilst I have had little time to play with the beta version, my previous experience of Opera Mini on a Nokia has been great, I look forward to quicker and more browsing, care of, our Norwegian friends.

UPDATE After a few hours testing, it seems a little slower than expected and the “back” button on the G1 seems to dump you out of the browser more frequently than I would like – but being an early beta I am willing to give it some slack –  but I am looking forward to the next beta.