Pablo Averbuj

Opera mini

When I find myself stuck in a boring place (like the DMV) I turn to my last hope for mindless entertainment: my cell phone. Up until recently I had very limited options. Backgammon was enough to entertain me for at least 10 minutes, but it was starting to get old. Surfing the web via GPRS with the built in WAP browser was mildly entertaining; I used to have a few trivia games bookmarked but they’re now defunct. A couple of weeks ago I read about Opera Mini and just this week I got to try it out. It is amazingly good for a 64kb program. As a point of reference, on my XP system notepad.exe is 68kb. And thanks go the mobile edition of Google Reader, I can keep up with my reading. It doesn’t support javascript or DHTML but one can hardly hold that against it. The UI took some getting used to but that’s likely because I was used to the built in WAP browser. If you have a phone that lacks a decent browser and supports MIDP 1.0 or higher take advantage.