Opera Mini… on a phone

I finally got to use Opera Mini on a phone today. A pretty basic Nokia 3510i landed in my hands and I thought, well I might as well try it. I downloaded Opera Mini (the lo-fi version), and within a minute or two I was up and running. Rendering was more than adequate for checking out sites, and once I'd figured out that you use the 'call' key for triggering links (I'm generally hopeless with phones), navigation was straightforward as well.

Natch, the rendering can't match what Opera Mini can deliver on my Palm T|C. That's truly stunning as you can see here, but given the basic limitations of the Nokia I was very impressed:

I'm also playing around with the latest version of Documents to Go on the Palm. Version 8 reads native pdf files. Previously there was a clunky – and basically unsatisfactory – adobe conversion routine that generated a pseudo-pdf file for the Palm. There was considerable loss of detail, and very poor treatment of embedded material. Plus it required a desk-top conversion and hot-sync to get the file on to the handheld. It worked, but only just and I very rarely bothered to use it. Now I can just open real pdf's that are emailed in. They look great, render really well, and on the T|C open at a very decent speed (faster than my desktop by some distance!).

So a bit of a techie day all told… until I saw who was waiting outside the back door tonight.