Opera Mini 5.1 goes native on Nokia S60 Opera has beta-ed a native Symbian incarnation of its low-bandwidth Opera Mini browser. Previously, Opera Mini for Symbian was a Java app. The Norwegian browser maker says its native Opera Mini 5.1 beta offers better start-up times and better page-load and scrolling performance, "especially on older devices." It also taps …
Seriously, how many people actually using Series 60 phones anymore are under than age of 70? Series 60 wasn't even interesting until the cost of a Series 60 and a Series 40 phone was the same at the store. With the Series 60 phone, you got more ring tones.
It might the the #1 selling Smart Phone operating system in the world, but if 99.995% of the users don't use it for more than making calls, storing phone numbers and telling them what time it is, then why bother even talking about the OS.
Frankly, I really think the Sony Ericsson system was a much nicer feature phone UI and it was much faster too.
If Nokia could capture the 50+ market I expect they would be very happy. It's an ageing population if you've not noticed. My E Series has real keys and while I use it mostly for voice and mail I do have the occasional app, mostly for specific news (Bloomberg, F1 app, ..). I will happily point out it supports VoIP out of the box (I'm on SIPgate, what SIP provider do you use?). I would consider an Android based handset if it came in a candy bar format with real keys (T9 is enough for me, I don't really need qwerty). But it has to support all of the functions I use on the E Series (GPS, wifi, integrated VoIP, voice (with noise cancelling mic), Java apps, native apps, push email, push calendar, FM -RDS radio and internet radio. And at least a three day battery life.
Oh, and I'm under the age of 70, too.
I use my S60, erm Symbian Platform devices (I currently have a Nokia N73 that's still going strong) heavily for Web browsing, listening to music - and Scrobbling it to my last.fm profile, reading PDFs, taking photos, and as an alarm clock (with an older version of Alarm Manager to resolve the "can't have multiple alarms, or recurring alarms" issue). I also sometimes play games, plus I've dabbled with Python for S60 and the Mobile Web Server tech demo.
Did I mention that they're also really great phones in terms of audio quality (for both calls and multimedia), and have sane antenna designs so that they're capable of actually maintaining network connectivity - even if you hold them in an unusual manner (unlike one of Apple's recent toys).
As someone who's owned a Sony Ericsson dumbphone, I can say that although they have some nice gimmicks (e.g. support for geotagging photos via A-GPS, a Bluetooth remote control feature, and USB Ethernet emulation/bridging), and last for weeks on two charges, their UI makes me want to throw them against a wall occasionally.
As for this Opera Mini beta, it feels significantly faster than the J2ME version, and being able to use the native input mechanism for entering non-alphanumeric characters is a nice bonus.
Disclaimer: I happen to be a Symbian Platform developer and SF community member in my spare time (when I'm not studying at university), although this is entirely my own opinion.
It's only lately that I've noticed comments not working though and I think that's just an issue with version 5. With non touch screen phones I still prefer version 3 to be honest and have just put 5.1 on my N86 and have had no problems. To be honest though I think on the touch screen phones (only really used the X6 (32 and 16 gb versions) so not many) the native Nokia Web Browser works much better than on the no touch screen phones and I find myself using that more than Opera, only on the touch screen phones by the way. Still, looking forward to using an C7 or N8.
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