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Opera mobile has widely been seen as the most popular 3rd party native browser for smartphones ever. This browser for Symbian all started back in 2003 with the advent of opera 6.0 for Nokia s60 (then series 60) smartphones based on OS v6.1 . Devices such as the Nokia Ngage, Ngage QD, Nokia 6600, Nokia 6620 all ran opera quite dutifully with some such as the 6620 even shipping with the browser in it’s trial version. Opera mobile version 6.1 was released later the same year with a few improvements such as support for WML (WAP) and proxy servers (rendering it capable of using the WAP settings in mobile phones). The biggest jump of the browser came in 2005 with the release of opera v8.0 and opera 8.5 consecutively, all breaking compatibility with the older Symbian os6.1 devices (Ngage, Ngage QD, 3650, 3660). This version came with improved rendering of CSS elements and DHTML support along password save support. All versions hereafter supported only the newer Symbian os9 which is binary incompatible with all previous OS versions.

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Newer opera 10 is the first Symbian version of opera mobile to support flash and flashlite plug-ins, it also brought improvements of the Presto rendering engine and a new refreshed user interface.

Review

Opera mobile is finally out of beta stage, having gone through three heavily tested betas, so now we can get on with a review without having to make excuses, which would have been the case if it was still in beta. The final browser starts at about 25% quicker than it’s beta predecessors, a good thing for those impatient folks.

After starting up you are presented with a slick looking user interface:

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The first thing opera desktop/opera mini sync users will rush to is the opera link option buried in settings, however all problems start there. I had problems syncing since the last beta 3 and encountered the same ‘parsing failed’ error note here:

It occurred much more frequently in this final version than in beta 3, which leaves me to wonder whether or not it is opera mobile’s or my account’s fault. Once you got your bookmarks synced(or not) you can go straight ahead to doing what browsers are meant to do – browse the internet.

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2 responses to “Opera mobile(Nokia s60 version) final review.”

  1. “opera 10 is the first Symbian version of opera mobile to support flash and flashlite plug-ins”

    then….

    “Opera Mobile is a modern, fully featured browser that supports most major web contents and protocols. It is one of the best of it’s class and outperforms the built in browser in everyway except for the lack of flash.”

    ummmm…am I missing something or is that a flat out contradiction?

  2. No there isnt a contradiction, if anything I should have explained it a bit more. The browser itself does support the plugin for flash but nokia does not allow it to access the flashite plugin that is shipped with their phones, thus flash does not work.

    I think the issue itself was a big sour point between nokia and opera when opera mobile 9.x went live, which contributed to it not being made available for nokia symbian phones.