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Opera Mini 5 beta - First Impressions.

Opera Mini beta has arrived and I have been using it for a couple of days. Here are the things that I liked and disliked.
Likes:
- New sleek ui (The new ui is simply great except that the scaling seems a little larger. I hope Opera Mini folks will fine tune it before the final release.)
- Tabs (This has been the feature that I have been eagerly waiting for long. Tabs are implemented quite magnificiently and Opera Mini has made me say wow again.)
- Copy and paste (This has also been a feature I have long awaited.)
- Speed dial (The speed dial looks more like a speed dial now and it rhymes well with a phone's keypad, thus serving more of its purpose well as the name.)
- Inline text editing (This is a feature that I almost new they would implement, after the auto-complete address bar in Opera Mini 4.2)
- Faster than 4.2 (Opera Mini 5 is indeed faster than its predecessor, despite some ramblings by users that its not. This is my observation and the results of my tests so far.)
- Password manager (or the so called wand in Opera's terms. I have never liked saving passwords anywhere I use a browser. Not at home, not in office, and not even in the portable browsers in my pen drive. But Opera Mini 5 has really changed my habits. I am starting to love the convenience of not having to type my username and password again and again.)

Dislikes:
- Download, Opera Link and feeds are disabled in beta. Will be added later. I could acess feeds by typing feed:list in address bar. I indeed have it as my 5th speed dial now. Also I am having the impression that they are going to implement a better download manager and not just the download page, when the final version comes out. Also I guess that more will be added to Opera Link. Could be searches and wand.
- Saved pages from 4.2 are not supported in 5. This is something that I really hate. Now I am not going to port the over 200 saved pages from Opera Mini 4.2 to 5. Instead I would have to keep a copy of 4.2 (perhaps renamed), until someone finds a solution (either Opera Mini folks make saved pages from 4.2 compatible with 5 or someone would find a way to convert them).
- No option to open page with images, while clicking a link. This was a feature that I loved and used often in Opera Mini 4.2. I hope it is not removed and would be back soon.
- Crashes. This isn't a dislike actually. As it is beta software, people should expect and accept crashes and bugs, which would eventually be fixed.

Overall, I like the new Opera Mini 5 beta and hope it would be final soon.

PS, I am posting this from Opera Mini 5 beta.

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Labels: Crap