The End User

The experience I got from my day with Dimension was one of hope. Now I've been given a tantalizing glimpse of the future of mobile web browsing. It's a future I've always believed in, always known would be with us one day.

Sure, there are a couple of wrinkles that need to be ironed out, but that's the reason for the beta. When the final version arrives this browser is guaranteed to shock and impress people as much as the original Opera Mini did, over a year ago. And that's the real achievement of Opera Mini 4.

Thanks go to the Opera Mini team for all the hard work they've put in. Also I'd like to thank the many wonderful members of the Opera community who kept me entertained while we all waited for the beta.

20th June - 8:30am
I love mobile technology. Years ago, I used to spend hundreds per year on getting new phones with the latest features. Nowadays I can't afford to do that and I tend to miss out on things.

Fortunately all it takes is a little common sense to stay ahead of the game.

A friend with a phone on the UK network 3 starts boasting to me about everything they can do with that network. He hasn't quite realised that all 3g phones can do those things, not just those on that network.

You should have seen the look on his face when I whipped out my phone, and showed him the web via Dimension. And you should have seen the smile when I told him he might be able to use it too. Don't worry, I passed the address on. I'm not petty enough to withold it just because he doesn't know phones as well as I do.

Speaking of common sense, it probably would've been a good idea to upload those comic photos I promised yesterday before I deleted them, wouldn't it. Especially as I spent so long taking them.

As a consolation, I've uploaded a dozen or so extra photos into the album that I haven't used in this blog.

20th June - 7:40am
Back again. Don't know if you've noticed, but I finally caught up with myself on this page.

Looks like quite a few people are having problems with the beta. The main "problem" people are having is that it doesn't have the full functionality of Opera Mini 3.1. Sometimes I'd swear I'm the only one who reads the press releases. It hasn't got all the features of Opera Mini 3.1 because it isn't an evolution of 3.1.

When Opera Mini 2 was finished the team split and started work on two projects. One was Opera Mini 3 and the other was Dimension. Opera Mini 3 continued the basic browser and added new functionality. Dimension, on the other hand, is a whole new browser started from scratch.

By the time the full version is available, I'm sure that both projects will have been mixed together to create the ultimate mobile browsing experience. Personally I can't wait.

20th June - 6:50am
I've got two hours worth of extra testing left to do before my Day With Opera Mini 4 is over. I've visited so many sites, seen so many things that people thought would never be possible on a mobile phone. It's kind of ironic that the only site I've had problems with so far is Opera's own community site, and that seems to only be a problem for me as far as I can tell.

My favourite feature so far? That's gotta be the new navigation system. Keys 2, 4, 6 and 8 move the page up, left, right and down respectively. Key 5 is used to zoom in and out. And key 1 brings up the context menu, which contains some of the more useful options like the ability to load the next page without any images. Combined with the mouse pointer on the screen it really does feel like full web browsing.

Last night I was checking the basic functionality of the browser. It still contains some of the excellent features of the previous Opera Minis, but in my mind, the most useful feature it's retained is the ability to store previous addresses that you type in and reference them while entering another web address. For a guy like me, that helps my bad memory out no end, as well as helping out my bad memory.

20th June - 6:30am
Aha! It turns out the problem reading the CSS was down to my ridiculously long blog title. Now that I've cut it down a bit, it works perfectly.

Hmmm... The beta had an issue yesterday with cookies expiring quite early meaning users got logged out quite quickly.

I woke up this morning to find I was still logged in to my main account on it so I guess that's been resolved already.

19th June - 10pm
You know what, I haven't checked my hotmail account in a while. Let's see how it looks.

A load of junk and spam in there at the moment.

Hmmm, this looks interesting. Never heard of the guy. Wonder what it says.

Wow, a distant relative of mine has died in a plane crash in south africa. They left fifteen million US dollars in an account and I'm the sole surviving heir. All I've got to do to collect it is send my bank details to the guy who sent the e-mail. Yeah, that's gonna happen because I'm just that stupid.

19th June - 8pm
I finally found those comic scans I was after, but now it's too late to take detailed photos. Maybe I'll take some tomorrow when the sun is bright enough for good results.

For now though have a couple of earlier photos of the comic site. This is just a full page and close up of a cover on the site. Tomorrow I'll go through a comic book page, panel by panel, to prove that they can be read in the new version of Opera Mini.

I still can't make a post using Dimension. It's even more annoying because my friend Mart can and has done. He's using a K800i, I'm using a W850i, they should react the same with java applications and the way they act online.

Luckily the feedback link is working for me now. It must have just glitched a bit when I tried to report the problem before. Now it's been reported I'm sure it'll be fixed in time for the full version.

19th June - 6pm
I've decided to enter the contest and have spent the last few hours taking and uploading photos as well as relaying some of my experiences with Dimension.

I thought it might be fun to show some of the experiences I had waiting for Dimension as well as those I've had since it's release.

Also, I heard someone complaining that myspace.com didn't work with Opera Mini 3 so I thought I'd check it out with the new one. Anyone who knows me knows my hatred of myspace, so you can appreciate the effort that went into taking these photos for you.

19th June - 2pm
I'm home from town and I've been able to properly play around with Dimension now. I've been checking out loads of different sites, and they all display beautifully. Whether I'm looking something up on the mormon website for my girlfriend's grandmother, checking the price and availability of an old cd or scanning the Lionhead forums to see when Fable 2 will be released, it all displays as it does on a PC.

I'm getting ready for a pretty good imaging test now. I'm going to try and find some old comic scans and see how they display in the new browser.

That may have to wait a while though. My friend's just mailed me and told me that Opera is running a competition to win a Sony Ericsson w950i. All we have to do is write our experiences with the first 24 hours of Dimension. Hmmm, I'd already planned to do that anyway. Maybe I should enter this page into the competition when it's done? Hmmm, I'll think about it.

19th June - 11:30am
I've just spent the last half an hour visiting different sites and zooming in and out to try them out. What? I'm a kid at heart, it's a good thing. Although I will admit, my quarter-pounder got cold pretty quickly...

The BBC news site looks brilliant to me. Let's see how Google looks shall we? I wonder if it'll be able to show the weather based themes that're available?

Everything looks so much better using Dimension. It's mind blowing to think that this is going to be improved upon by the time the full release is ready.

19th June - 10am
I'm a bloody idiot. All I had to do was check out another site and suddenly I realised why 4-way scrolling had been introduced.

The site I visited was play.com and this is what I saw...

Seven years ago I was arguing with a friend about the mobile internet. My stance was that within the decade we'd have the full web on mobile phones as it is on PCs. Today Opera proved me right. I almost cried with joy when I saw play.com come up looking exactly how it did on a PC.

The only problem was, I couldn't read it, because the text was too small. One swift click of the 5 key sorted that out though, and it suddenly zoomed in so I saw this...

Yeah, I'm running a price check on the new remastered Transformers animated movie. I've only been waiting 21 years for it. At least I'm persistent eh?

19th June - 9:20am
Grrr... It won't let me post anything to my blog. Not only that but it keeps logging me out really quickly. So far I'm not impressed.

Had to use normal Opera Mini to post this.

Not only that but it promises so much but doesn't quite deliver. Yes, it understands a bit more CSS and displays my blog's header with the theme I chose. Unfortunately the theme doesn't seem to fit properly and there's a thin line at the top of the header where the theme repeats.

I also don't understand why they bothered introducing 4-way scrolling. All it does is take me to a blank space to the right of my blog. The sidebar is still shown below the actual main body of the blog. Not so impressive after all.

19th June - 9:10am
I've got it, yay! Right then, let me see...

Only two connection tests? Hmmm, I bet that'll change in the official version. Yes yes, I accept the terms and conditions. Just let me browse.

Wow, the start page is a lot prettier. It's got a sort of metallic effect going on. Not much to it at this stage though. Just an address entry bar, the yahoo search bar and the bookmarks.

Let's have a look in the settings menu and see what we can see. Oh... It just seems to be the basic settings menu. Hold on, what's this? Fit to width and auto zoom. Hmmm, I wonder what they do? Oh well, let's leave the settings as they are for now and head back to the start page. I think I'll check out my Opera page first.

Oh sweet, a little "click here to edit" sign just popped up in the address bar that I've got highlighted. I love little things like that. They make it feel more like a web browser than a phone application.

I'm going to have to log in to Opera again before I do anything else. Looks like they've announced it on the frontpage as well. Still no-one else has seen it and commented. We'll soon change that.

19th June - 9am
A new blog post by Opera Mini. This is it. This is where they cancel it.

I was wrong! IT'S HERE!!!

Don't think anyone else has seen it yet. They haven't commented, that's for sure.