Opera Mini for Android

Android is a software stack for mobile devices that includes an operating system, middleware and key applications.

It’s important to recognize that the Open Handset Alliance and Android have the potential to be major changes from the status quo — one which will take patience and much investment by the various players before you’ll see the first benefits. But we feel the potential gains for mobile customers around the world are worth the effort.

The latest trend in android is the new Opera mini which is compatible with Android.

Opera was pretty excited about Google's Android and thought it was a cool idea to have a mini Opera running in Android.  But it goes beyond just cool factor - one of Opera's central doctrines is providing the best internet experience on any device - the Android platform is another missing piece of the puzzle to be filled.The Opera Mini browser renders web pages that have been transcoded to the binary OBML format.

Now lets have a look at the issues Opera faced while making Opera mini over android :

• First, the Android platform is a very fresh set of APIs. There is not much information available on the web, and the community around Android is just forming, so sometimes it is difficult to find an answer if something during development is not going very well and you have questions.

• Next, you need to consider that Android is not a finished product yet - for example, the last SDK update changed a large number of the APIs, so as they  fixed existing issues, new problems appeared; the most serious being performance degradation of the emulator, which  are currently being  working on. Access to any hardware that will run Android is not there. It is currently impossible to say how fast Opera Mini will run on real devices.