I was a huge fan of Opera Mini from the moment I discovered it. It's a mobile web browser, and it blew my phone's standard browser out of the water. It had some limitations versus the built-in browser (i.e. unable to play streaming video) and some limitations that affect the majority of mobile browsers (can't display/run Javascript), but it got the job done and was much easier and nicer to use.



But today the team released the second beta of Opera Mini 4 and the new features are amazing. Most notably, you can now change the browser orientation to landscape mode (by hitting *#), which is extremely useful since OM4 does iPhone-style website resizing/zooming. But OM4 also is very smart about getting content to fit in the screen and adjusting where you are on the page so you don't have to do much horizontal scrolling, if any, as you move down the page.

The other big feature is one I love in Firefox...being able add any search field on any site to your overall search box. So when OM started using Yahoo search a few months back after using Google before that, a lot of people were left groaning. Now you can add Google, IMDb, eBay, whatever. And especially when it comes to mobile browsing, saving time and page loads is key so this is very useful. It used to be a bit of a hassle to find something on IMDb and now it takes seconds.

There's a lot of other new features...I've just talked about the most notable (to me). There's also encryption support (while this is big, I still don't think I would ever do anything truly secure (i.e. financial transactions, banking) on a mobile browser), better image quality, BlackBerry integration, intelligent font resizing, etc.

After using OM4, you'll find your phone's built-in browser is nearly useless (I only use mine for application downloads or to watch YouTube videos on TinyTube). And for those that aren't on an unlimited data plan, OM lets you set it to not load images.

If you don't have your phone handy or just want to test it out, you can use their simulator.