Social goes big on Opera Mini
Also in Opera Mini Next is the ability to set more than nine sites to Speed Dial. However, the Android and iOS versions of Opera Mini won't include the Home screen. Instead, smartphone versions of Opera Mini Next will see smoother browsing powered by hardware acceleration.Opera Mini Next installs concurrently to the stable version of Opera Mini and can be distinguished by a white icon as opposed to the standard red one.Joining Opera Mini Next 7 on stage is the latest full update to the Mini's smartphonecounterpart. Opera Mobile 12 for Android, leap-frogging the version number of Opera for PCs, which are still on version 11, includes several notable changes. Opera Mobile 12 brings WebGL support for 3D rendering on your smartphone, native HTML5 support, the same unlimited number of Speed Dial sites as Opera Mini Next has, and in-browser support for your device's camera. Gronvold suggested an Opera-built demo Web site at shinydemos.comfor testing WebGL on the mobile browser.As for the future of Opera on mobile devices, Gronvold expressed high hopes but he said that it's going in a different direction from competitors such as Mozilla. "A Boot-to-Gecko system is something that we're not interested in. We dabbled in it with Opera Platform in 2004, but we don't see it as a solution for our product portfolio with our partners," he said.Instead, Opera will continue to develop Mini and Mobile concurrently. Mini will focus on feature phones, lower-powered smartphones, or those devices on rate-limited networks, while Mobile will be a more precise replica of the PC version of Opera.Updated at 5:09 p.m. PT: The final version of Opera Mini 7 for iOS is now available in the iTunes Store.
