Opera beats iPhone to full mobile web browser

Mobile phone users can now get a smooth-zooming, improved mobile internet browsing experience with the Opera Mini 4 beta web browser.

The Opera Mini 4 beta is the latest version of Opera's popular mobile phone web browser, introducing an overview page view of full web pages with smooth zooming facilities. Users can view complete web pages, scaled to fit a phone display - like a thumbnail image, with text too small to read. They can then zoom into the part of the page they want to read.

This makes navigating around a web page on a small phone screen a far easier and quicker experience. Opera claims this, and its ability to work on almost all new mobile phones, gives it a head-start over the soon-to-be-launched Apple iPhone .

Opera Mini 4 beta version is designed to make it easier for users to view web pages. As well as the full page view and zoom, it includes a virtual mouse with an onscreen cursor to make viewing easier.

Easier navigation

The phone's keypad can be used to scroll around the screen, making navigation easier. The Opera Mini 4 beta version still includes the familiar Opera Mini small screen rendering option to fit the page to the screen for easy scrolling. And users can choose to load pages with or without images to speed up rendering.

Opera Mini 4 beta is available to test at http://www.operamini.com/beta . It is compatible with most mobile phones. Mobile users can also get Opera Mini 3.1 free of charge from http://www.operamini.com .