Doesn't work, makes Safari 3 beta look like polished release class software
If you know how bad the Blazer Browser is on Palm OS on a Treo 650, it's no surprise I downloaded this right away.
The Opera Beta only takes 223K and comes in a native Palm OS format. Ok, so downloaded and installed. Error... you also need the Java WebSphere VM from IBM. Pretty sure I already had Java on this phone, and so much for a "native " Palm app. Oh well, nearly 2MB of memory later, I have the WebSphere Java VM installed.
Launch the browser. It configures itself for my connection, and I'm online. Wow, what a buggy piece of garbage. In the options scree, it doesn't recognize the stylus (except for scroll dragging) and I have to use the direction pad to highlight options then click to turn them on or off. No page zooming either (the feature I wanted!) I figure page zooming must be a setting I have to turn on. Ah, auto zoom is off, I'll turn it on. No difference. Oh wait, maybe it's the fit to page setting. Nope, no difference. Also, the font rendering is horrible (their smallest font is huge, much larger than Blazer's smallest font). In Opera's defence, theregister.com did load about four times faster in Opera than in Blazer. Unfortunatly page display/rendering is much worse than the Blazer Browser. Anyway, I'll go back to Blazer, which is so sad.
So much for Opera giving an iPhone feel on other phones. Maybe zoom works on everything but the Palm OS. Oh and it didn't even recognize the menu button on my phone to get to the drop down menu to appear. I had to click "menu" on the screen to go there. It also didn't appear to support tabbed browsing, something I believe Safari on the iPhone supports. It's a shame they put more effort into their video than this browser. Or at the very least, released this version too soon because they wanted to show their video.
I don't mind attitude against the iPhone (in fact, it almost begs to have it) but you'd better deliver something that works as promised if you are going to pick on a product with so much excitement [hype – Ed.] surrounding it. Opera should've let the iPhone and Safari crash (or succeed if it does) on its own if this is their best effort.