umpcportal home

Tag Archive | "opera"

Opera. Turbo-Charged and LiMo luvin!


I just wanted to round-up a couple of Opera-related news items that have come through the wires over the last few days. The first is an announcement about a ‘Opera Turbo’ and the second is an announcement that Opera are joining LiMo.

The Opera Turbo announcement is one I’ve been waiting for ever since the 9.6 SDK announcement way back at IBC in September. It’s OBML support, now renamed and re-marketed as Opera Turbo. At least I think it is! OBML is the process/protocol that Opera Mini uses and all the diagrams and descriptions point to the same methodology although the OBML acronym isn’t actually mentioned anywhere in the documentation.

operaturbo

What it means is that you could have one program for both WLAN and WWAN-based usage. If you find yourself in a 2.5G area or your data is being charged on a per-byte basic you can just switch to turbo mode and carry on with your familiar browser using a compressed, proxied service. The best of both worlds!

More details on Turbo in this white paper. (PDF) Press Release

The second announcement came today and informs us all that Opera has joined LiMo the Linux-based mobile software foundation (who also made announcements today.)

Opera Software today announced that it has joined the swelling ranks of mobile Linux leaders in the LiMo Foundation. Opera has a long history in developing its browser for the Linux platform and by joining this mobile Linux community the company hopes to contribute to the advancement of open and accessible mobile phone technology.

Opera’s ‘One Web’ vision revolves around the hope for a single, pervasive Internet, available to anyone, anywhere. By working closely with LiMo, Opera can ensure absolute compatibility with this platform, enabling easier development and faster time-to-market. Together, Opera and LiMo plan to nurture richer services, better user experiences and more affordable devices in the mobile industry by adhering to open standards-based development.

Joining LiMo might not exclude them from joining other organisations but it certainly sends a strong message out to Moblin and OHA.

Press release.

WM Smartphones get a Full Web Bashing.


wmphones Gizmodo have just completed a browsing speed and accuracy test with three high-end windows mobile devices using Pocket IE and Opera 9.5. The results should hardly be a surprise. There isn’t a single reasonable result among them with page load times well over a minute in many cases and very few of the devices rendering the pages well.

In the test, Gizmodo used the Sony Xperia, HTC Fuze, Samsung Omnia and Samsung Epix. Some of the newest WM-based phones you can buy.

Opera 9.5 appears to have turned in a better level of quality and speed than Pocket IE but there’s still a bunch of ‘fails’ in there which would turn off anyone thinking of relying on the given combo.

We’ve done similar tests here in the past which have proven that, on average, with some of the best ARM-based devices you can find and under good conditions, average page load times are twice as long when compared to on low-end ultra mobile PCs. We’ve even done some extensive Opera Mobile 9.5 testing and can confirm that while it does render well, it needs a lot more horsepower underneath it than the average smartphone can provide. Nothing in the smartphone world, including the iPhone, comes close to the speed and accuracy of even the lowest-level ultra mobile PC or Intel-based MID so once again I hear myself saying; If you or your business relies on fast, accurate access to Web-based resources through a browser, don’t risk problems or waste time by using a sub-standard solution. Don’t try and push everything onto one device. Buy a dedicated device. If not for the speed and quality, do it to preserve battery life for your important voice calls!

Take a read of the article and the HUGE bashing that WM gets from author, Matt Buchanan. Its a fun read!

Source: Gizmodo Via Friendfeed

Archos 5 hands on at IBC. Video. Thoughts.


When I wrote about Opera 9.5 Mobile a short while back I highlighted how it was a great browser with no hardware to run it on. What I said was that the processing power and screen size wasn’t enough for the software. The user interface was good but in order for it to be taken seriously as a crossover mobile/desktop, entertainment/productivity browser, it needed better hardware so when we heard about the new Archos devices recently and their Cortex ARM general purpose processors we knew there was a chance for some serious challenges to the Intel-based MIDs. The Archos devices have a rich, enjoyable touch user interfaces, very good video performance (see video below) and a suite of content and application accessory offerings that can be bolted on to improve the package further. Add the possibility of getting a 3G-enabled version and you got the makings of what could be one of the best MIDs yet. [More after the pic…]

archos5-2

Read the full story

Speedtest. Firefox 3 Recommended for UMPCs and Netbooks


ffumpc

Most, if not all of you reading this will have heard of the Firefox browser and many of you will have tried Firefox 3.0 beta. I held back from using it for a long time because it was beta software but the latest release candidate seems stable and has me converted on all platforms now. Firefox 3.0 is fast. Firefox 3.0 is memory efficient. Firefox 3.0 has great features and overall its a clear winner on ultra mobile PC and netbook platforms, especially when using online applications.

Like Safari, it appears from my test results that Firefox 3.0 can process java-heavy pages on a Ghz-class ultra mobile PC faster than the data arrives over my 6mbps Internet connection which means that for rich Internet applications, the bottleneck is at the remote server and there’s very little else you can do to speed up the experience. Apparently, java processing in FF3 is many many times faster than in version 2 so this explains the big improvement with online applications. Not only is the speed improved but there are some great features that will appeal to ultra mobile PC users too. But first, here’s some test results. I took 5 devices and ran speed tests on 3 browsers [*1] using reader.google.com as the target page. It’s a java-heavy page and there’s no flash or major numbers of images to process but its typically my slowest-loading browser application. It represents a typical online application and for web-workers, its a good, tough benchmark.

More info after the jump…

Read the full story

Opera Mobile 9.5 to Elevate Smartphones into MID territory?


I just blogged that 88% of my mobile device usage is with a browser. I dare say that if I had a device that was fast enough, had a good enough touchscreen and offered a real, http-based client browser then i’d be happy. Indeed, my own ideal device specifications from Feb 2006 run along those lines with the definition being open to any processing platform as long as it delivers a quality Internet experience.

This is the reason that I’m very interested in seeing how good Opera Mobile 9.5 is on the ARM Smartphone platforms. If it’s good enough its going to elevate big-screen smartphones into devices that I’d consider alongside an Intel MID. Take the iPaq 210/214 for example. Its only got a VGA touchscreen and no 3G but with Opera Mobile 9.5 it really could satisfy a lot of peoples mobile Internet requirements for a Nokia N810-beating price.

Matt Miller of ‘The Mobile Gadgeteer’ says Opera 9.5 is the ‘Best mobile browser I’ve ever used.’ and that it ‘provides more functionality than the rather revolutionary Apple iPhone browser.’ I say that this browser will make many people think twice about buying a MID because it not only looks and reacts well but its got some very nice advanced features. But there are clearly limitations. Google Docs didn’t work in Matts test which, although you may not use Google docs, should be a concern if you depend on complex sites like Meebo, iGoogle, Facebook etc. Flash-Lite is included which is good but how are other media types presented and supported? How fast can it render the full-fat Google Reader webpage? I know it takes a low-power PC about 15 seconds to render my Google Reader page. Any smartphone on the market today is going to have trouble doing that in under 25 seconds.

[Video after the break…]

Read the full story

Opera Mini 4.1 upgrade brings noticeable improvements.


operamini Opera Mini usage overtook use of the slow S60 browser on my N82 a long time ago due to its easy to use features and the way it renders pages but mostly, because of it’s speed. It uses a man-in-the-middle server to provide cached and optimised versions of pages that are transmitted using proprietary technology, not HTTP, to the client. Its not perfect but it works well for the average ‘browsing’ session. Version 4.1 has just been released and it brings a feature that I was missing from the S60 browser – URL history. It’s also a little faster although not that you’d really notice it in general use. I’d love to have a version of this for Windows so that I could run it on a ultra mobile PC if data usage was tight (when roaming for example) or when I’m in a fringe area and down to GPRS speeds but alas, its not available. Why don’t they build that feature into Opera desktop? It would be great to switch into proxied mode when needed.

jkOnTheRun have a list of the other new features which include web page saving (again, something I was using on the S60 browser) and more. If you want to upgrade your phone, point it to http://www.operamini.com/

Follow Chippy on  TwitterFollow Chippy on  YouTube

The most popular UMPCs on UMPCPortal

Acer Aspire Switch 10
10.1" Intel Atom Z3745
Acer C740
11.6" Intel Celeron 3205U
VIA Nanobook
7.0" VIA C7-M
Lenovo Ideapad Flex 10
10.1" Intel Celeron N2806
Acer Aspire E11 ES1
11.6" Intel Celeron N2840
Dell Chromebook 11
11.6" Intel Celeron 2955U
Dell Latitude E7440
14.0" Intel Core i5-4200U
Acer TravelMate B113
11.6" Intel Core i3
HP Elitebook 820 G2
12.5" Intel Core i5 5300U
Acer Chromebook 11 CB3-131
11.6" Intel Celeron N2807

Find ultra mobile PCs, Ultrabooks, Netbooks and handhelds PCs quickly using the following links: