The beta of Opera Mini 4 is now available from the Opera website. The new version renders a full page overview from which you can then zoom in to read the page (very reminiscent of S60’s browser overview / minimap mode). New features include the introduction of a mouse and power scrolling making it easier to move around pages and a quick access context menu.

The beta seems reasonable stable, although as a Java application it does use a fair amount of RAM on Symbian devices. The rendering is good, although not quite perfect in places. However it is very impressive to see this sort of application created in Java and given it can run on a great many devices should prove popular.

Web pages are not rendered in exactly the same way you would see them on a PC. Instead text is rendered in to columns which are are the width of your phone’s screen. This minimises the amount of scrolling needed when reading text.

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