Opera Mini 4.2 for Android goes gold
Opera Mini is a great mobile web browser and the latest version 4.2 has been released for the Android platform. You can find this jewel in the Android App Market on your T-Mobile G1 phone and get surfing right away. The beta version has been out for a few months and this final version 4.2 brings the following improvements over that beta:
- Now you can upload and download files through Opera Mini and save pages for offline viewing
- Videos will be redirected to the system’s video player
- Double tap now works for zooming in and out
- Inline URL entry instead of using native input
- Fixed password text entry to hide characters
- Fixed problems with exiting application when back button was pressed
- Improved trackball speed
- All internal pages, like the start page, now have font size extra large for easier navigation
(via Opera blog)
The video thing is significant… since I thought the Android G1 shipped without a player! Wonder what files/codecs/enclosures it’s capable of handling. Hm.
I’ll be testing it soon Dave and can offer a better answer then. The G1 did ship without a video player but one was available free through the App Market from the get go. It works pretty well.
The Android G1 is very cool, but it does have some quirks. It came with virtually no documentation of video capabilities, much less a player (although as James said that was addressed rather quickly). I’ve done a bunch of testing and it can playback h264 video in .mp4 containers, similar to iPhone but the specs are not an exact match. Bitrate and resolution limitations are different for example.