Opera Mobile 10.1 Android review

Opera prides itself on having a fast rendering engine and pages were quick to load on our phone. Testing directly against the default Android browser we found that Opera loaded Expert Reviews a couple of seconds quicker, although this isn’t too much to get excited about. The quality of the rendering was mostly good, although Expert Reviews had some errors in its navigation bar, despite the fact that the website displays properly in the native Android browser.

The upshot of this is that some websites that don’t work properly in the Android browser worked here. For example, the Argos ordering site wouldn’t let us fill out our credit card expiry date using the Android browser, but it worked perfectly using Opera.

Selecting anywhere on screen automatically zooms in to a comfortable viewing distance, so you can read text more clearly. By default this automatic zoom is set to 160 per cent, although you can adjust this in the Settings menu if you prefer. Text is automatically wrapped to the screen, although not on all sites; as with the default Android browser some forums and other sites cause text to hang off the side of the screen.

One of the main features of Opera is the Opera Turbo mode. Disabled by default, turning it on enables compression, allowing you to download complete websites faster and with less data. On a mobile connection it can make a big difference, with the added bonus that it can save on your data costs to. The trade-off is that image quality can deteriorate, so it’s good that the selection of this option is entirely up to you. If you want to read pages while you’re offline, Opera can download and save pages at the click of a button.