Opera for phones & tablets

Opera put the real Web on phones years before smartphones were common. Two browsers did most of the work: Opera Mobile, the full browser, and Opera Mini, the tiny Java browser powered by Opera's servers.

Opera Mobile

2000 – 2013 · Symbian S60 & UIQ, Windows Mobile, Android, MeeGo, Windows 7 tablets

The full Opera browser for smartphones and tablets: first on Psion and Symbian devices, then Windows Mobile, Android and MeeGo. Small-Screen Rendering and zoom on a phone, years before the iPhone.

Opera Mobile was the complete Opera browser, Presto engine included, adapted to phones: pages were laid out like on a computer, then you zoomed in and out. On small screens, Small-Screen Rendering reflowed pages into a single column so that they could be read without scrolling sideways.

It started on Psion organizers and Symbian phones around 2000, came to Windows Mobile in 2005 and to Android in 2010. Opera Mobile 9.7 (2009) added Opera Turbo, and Opera Mobile 10 (2010) a new interface with Speed Dial; Opera Mobile 11, in March 2011, brought more HTML5 and hardware-accelerated zoom. Phone makers such as Nokia, Sony Ericsson, HTC and Samsung shipped it pre-installed on many models.

Full Presto engine on the phone
Small-Screen Rendering
Opera Turbo (Opera Mobile 9.7)
Pre-installed by many phone makers

Downloads: Symbian S60 · Symbian UIQ (Sony Ericsson P800, P900…) · Windows Mobile · Android · MeeGo

Opera Mini

2005 – 2013 · Java ME phones, BlackBerry, Android, iPhone

A tiny Java (J2ME) browser that let Opera's servers do the heavy lifting: pages were compressed and pre-rendered in the cloud. It brought the real Web to hundreds of millions of ordinary phones.

Opera Mini turned the problem around: instead of running a browser on a slow phone, it let Opera's servers do the work. The servers fetched the page, ran it through Presto, compressed it by up to 90% and sent a compact pre-laid-out version of it (in Opera's OBML format) to a small Java application on the phone.

Tested in the Nordic countries and Germany in the autumn of 2005, and launched worldwide on January 24, 2006, Opera Mini ran on almost any phone that could run Java games. Opera Mini 4 (2007) showed the full page with a zoom, and Opera Mini 5 (2010) added tabs and Speed Dial. In countries where mobile data was slow and expensive, it was for many people the first way to reach the Web: by 2012 it was used by well over 100 million people each month.