Opera has stayed true to its word from Mobile World Congress and has released its WebKit-powered browser for Android users. While it retains much of the same design as its forebears, its increased rendering speed is immediately noticeable, and the new Speed Dial, along with the rest of the interface, is a little bit cleaner.
Opera is also boasting a new feature called Off-Road mode which, like its Mini counterpart, offloads some of the heavy duty rendering to the company’s servers through a proxy, saving massive amounts of bandwidth without interrupting the browsing experience. It ran fast and fluid on my Nexus 4, though it stayed true to its “beta” moniker by crashing fairly often.
Another feature available to users is a Discovery tab which, based on location, boils down relevant news stories in a magazine-like interface. It reminds me a little bit of HTC’s BlinkFeed but not quite as full-featured.
As always, Opera provides a robust download manager and the Speed Dial can be customized to suit your needs. While this won’t be replacing Chrome as my go-to Android browser, it’s nice to see more choices available on the Play Store, especially for users running versions of Android below Ice Cream Sandwich.
Opera Browser beta is available on Android 2.2 and higher. Download it now.
Via: Android Police
