Chances are your cell phone needs a better Web browser. While smartphones often come with powerful software for accessing the Internet, feature phones are usually left in the lurch. Fortunately, Opera Software has covered that niche for years with the free Opera Mini. When I last looked at Opera Mini 4.2, the company had re-added RSS feed support and brought online U.S.-specific servers to compress and deliver pages more quickly. Today, the just-released Opera Mini 5 (Beta) includes a thoroughly revamped interface, plus several key features that improve the browsing experience considerably.

Setup and navigation
To get the new beta, head to m.opera.com/next from your phone's current browser. If you have a recent phone and a data plan, chances are Opera Mini 5 will run on it. Even so, there are some caveats. Since it's a Java app, it won't run on Verizon feature phones, which don't use Java. T-Mobile blocks apps on many of their feature phones, mostly for no good reason. Some AT&T phones may hit you with persistent nag screens whenever the app accesses the Internet. Sprint users are A-OK. Opera Mini will run on BlackBerrys, but other smartphones (such as Windows Mobile and Palm OS) may require a Java virtual machine; some models have them, some don't. For this review, I tested Opera Mini 5 (beta) on a Samsung Reclaim on Sprint's network, and a BlackBerry Curve 8330 on Verizon's network.

When you first launch Opera Mini 5, you'll see Speed Dial, a new home screen that lets you call up favorite sites with one click. It looks similar to Safari 4's icon-based launch page on the desktop. You can add pages to Speed Dial by clicking on any empty slot and entering a URL; these links are separate from bookmarks, which also still exist. Once you're viewing a page, a new drop-down address bar features a Google Search box on the right, which you can also configure for Wikipedia searches. Opera Mini 5 now includes tabbed browsing; you can now keep multiple tabs open the same way you can with the smartphone-oriented Opera Mobile 9.7 Beta. There's a plus (+) icon to add a new tab, in addition to large Back and Forward buttons, a Speed Dial screen button, a Refresh button, and a "power" button that exits the app. All in all, it feels like using a miniature desktop browser, even on the low-end Samsung Reclaim.

Performance
As before, Opera compresses pages up to 90 percent on their own servers before sending them to the phone. This maximizes slow EDGE and 1xRTT data network connections on older phones, or phones in non-3G areas. Opera's method works. WAP pages appeared almost instantly while connected to Sprint 3G. Desktop pages like the New York Times homepage took longer, but still looked good and appeared within 15 to 20 seconds. With Opera Mini 5, the zoom box moved a little more smoothly than on previous versions, while the rest of the page is now grayed out slightly. I found it simple to use the "mouse" cursor as always.

Opera Mini was always good at adapting to different phones and screen resolutions. But now the app optimizes its control scheme for touchscreen phones or hardware keypad phones. Meanwhile, a new password manager lets you check Facebook or read e-mail without logging in each time or staying dependent on Web browser cookies. Overall UI performance was quite snappy on the Reclaim, though sluggish on the Curve 8330; I spent plenty of time watching a spinning hourglass while waiting to swap tabs or bring up bookmarks, and many common pages didn't come up at all.

Gripes and Conclusions
Unfortunately, Opera still doesn't support Flash, AJAX, or dynamic HTML. That means desktop HTML pages have blank boxes where they should have dynamically-changing content. Opera said they're omitting these processor-heavy data hogs so the browser can run even on four-year-old feature phones such as the Motorola RAZR V3, and sip data through slow networks. However, Skyfire 1.0 represents rich media well, although it admittedly transfers more data than Opera Mini. Another gripe: if you'd rather look at mobile sites than desktop versions, you need to know their exact URLs, since many sites show their desktop modes by default to Opera Mini. Opera Mini handles desktop pages well. But sometimes it's still faster to view, say, CNN's WAP site (m.cnn.com) on a feature phone for a quick news scan, instead of waiting for the full page to load and then dealing with the zoom box.

Despite those issues, there's not much competition for Opera Mini. There are other good third-party browsers out there, including Bolt and Skyfire. But none work on as many devices as Opera Mini, especially on feature phones. Opera Mini 5 remains a must-download for anyone with a recent cell phone and an active data plan. It also regains its crown as an Editors' Choice mobile app.

For more on browsing the Web on the go, read our guide on how to upgrade your cell phone's mobile browser.

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