Opera Mobile 10.1 Android review

With the Android version of its Mobile web browser, Opera is hoping to make the internet faster, smoother and easier to use on the small screen of a smartphone. Currently in Beta, we downloaded the latest version (Opera Mobile 10.1) to find out how good it really is.

As it’s in Beta, there’s no guarantee that the software will work on all devices. Testing on a Samsung Galaxy Tab we couldn’t get the browser to work at all; all we got was the splash screen, before the Tab switched back to the previous application we were looking at. However, on our Nexus One we had no such problems.

Opera’s done a good job with the interface, fitting a small, always-visible toolbar at the bottom of the screen. This contains navigation, refresh, tabs and settings buttons. The fact that they’re so handy makes it easy to browse the web, although you can hide them if you find that they take up too much screen space.

Hitting the tab button opens a small panel containing thumbnails of the sites you’ve got open, with the option to close each window or create a new one. It works well and is an improvement over the text interface of the default Android browser, but it’s not as slick or as easy to use as the HTC or Samsung Galaxy versions, which take up the entire screen.