Unless you have a Windows Mobile or Symbian/S60 phone, Opera Mobile is not available for you to download to your phone. Enjoy Opera Mini!

Many users have a few questions about the difference between Opera Mobile 10 and Opera Mini 5. This post will attempt to clarify.

First, here is what they have in common:

• Both are based on the same core technology, the Opera Presto browser engine (just like Opera for desktop).
• Both use the same cross-platform user interface, providing similar features and browsing experience.

And the difference:

• In Opera Mini, the Opera Presto browser engine is located on a server. In Opera Mobile, it is installed on your phone.

When you enter a Web address in Opera Mobile, the Web page is fetched directly from the Web server to your phone. However, the Opera Mini client sends a request to the Opera Mini server, which downloads the page from the Internet. The server then transcodes the page before it is forwarded to the client in a lightweight mark-up language designed specifically for this purpose.

The advantage is that the Opera Mini client can be much smaller and work on more basic phones than the full Opera Mobile browser.

On the other hand, Opera Mini depends on a server while Opera Mobile does not. (Opera Turbo is an optional service for Opera Mobile that compresses Web pages and makes it cheaper to browse, but it is not required).

In practical terms, here is what that means for you:

• Opera Mobile will render Web pages just like a desktop browser. In Opera Mini, there may be slight differences, and very complex Web pages may not work optimally.
• Opera Mini will generally be faster. It downloads less content and requires less CPU to render pages.
• Opera Mini works on almost any phone. Opera Mobile is only available for Windows Mobile and Symbian/S60 phones.

Which product is best for you depends on your personal preferences and the sites you browse. Many advanced users will have both browsers installed and alternate depending on the situation. For example, they will use Opera Mobile when on Wi-Fi, Opera Mini when on a cellular network.

Related posts:

1. Opera Mini For iPhone Coming At MWC 2010
2. Opera Mobile 10 Beta 3 For Symbian and Windows Mobile Released
3. Mini-Microsoft Speaks About Windows Mobile

Today Opera Mobile 10 moves one step closer towards final with the release of Opera Mobile 10 Beta 3 for both Symbian/S60 and Windows Mobile. Beta 3 includes a few new features, and a lot of bug fixing and stabilization. Read more on www.opera.com/mobile. Or download it now at www.opera.com/mobile/download/ from a PC or “m.opera.com” from a mobile phone.

New improvements include:

Windows Mobile Keypad Support:
Opera Mobile 10 Beta 3 now supports keypad devices running Windows Mobile 6 standard, and Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone devices.

Experimental Flashlite 3.1 (Windows Mobile):
This beta also brings experimental Flash support to Windows Mobile (touch devices only). However, Flash performance and usability depends greatly on how powerful your device is. On the 1Ghz HTC Touch HD2 the overall experience is quite good. On anything slower it varies from mediocre to poor.

Therefore Flash is disabled by default in the Opera Mobile settings. To enable flash goto Tools -> Settings -> Advanced and set plug-ins to “On”.

Note that Opera Mobile has Click-to-play functionality for plug-ins. So even when plug-ins are enabled you activate individual Flash content by clicking on it. This to minimize the use of bandwith and CPU on content you may not be interested in.

The main improvements from the previous betas are:

S60:
- Complete bookmark sync in Opera Link
- Support for non-latin characters in the UI also when phone is set to latin locale (requires international build)
- A lot of input and keyboard related fixes
- Fixed text selection
- Visual indication of input mode also for non-latin input modes
- General bug fixing (stability, UI)

Windows Mobile
- keypad/smartphone support
- Flash Lite 3.1 support (disabled by default)
- Complete bookmark sync in Opera Link
- BIDI support also for language extensions
- phone numbers in plain text are converted to links
- support for background sound
- general bug fixing (stability, UI)

Known issues include:

Both:
- Opera Link: Bookmarks saved in Beta 2 are lost when upgrading to Beta 3
- Hotmail does not work, please use the mobile version “www.hotmail.com/m”
- Dragonfly – need to do ‘connect’ two times in a row to get a connection working

S60:
- After permanently accepting an untrusted certificate, you get an error when trying to load the https:// page again. Workaround: In the S60 device menu go to the Settings -> General -> Security -> Certificate Management -> Trusted site certificates and delete the certificate for the problematic site

Windows Mobile:
- Flash is only a preview/in alpha state, expect instabilities, performance degradation during use
- Flash is only supported on touch devices
- Need to double-click on Flash content to view it in full-screen, another double-click to return
- right-to-left support is not complete in the UI
- On certain WM5 Smartphone/WM6 Standard devices, the dictionary is not disabled in the password field
- Unable to type special characters on Moto Q9
- Certain HTC devices with TouchFLO will force Opera back to portrait mode if visiting home screen when Opera is in landscape
- Some input method editors are known not to work well with Opera because they do not comply with Microsoft’s SIP and/or IME standard. When such an editor is detected by Opera, Opera will use a known (default) input method instead. An exception is EzInput v1.5, where the phone keypad and compact QWERTY, ABC mode doesn’t work, but the rest of the modes work fine. We recommend upgrading to EzInput v2.0 to avoid this.

Related posts:

1. Difference between Opera Mobile and Opera Mini
2. Opera Mini For iPhone Coming At MWC 2010
3. SPB Mobile Shell Updates to v3.5.1 Beta