A few days ago, I installed Opera Mini on my Blackberry Curve. The experience offered by Opera Mini is really impressive. It retrieves and renders pages quickly and flawlessly. The interface is specifically designed to handle navigating long pages on a tiny screen. In short, it’s a great app, and a major improvement on the Blackberry Browser.
Here’s the catch (or catches). Links that appear in other applications won’t open in Opera, they’ll open in the Blackberry browser. What’s worse is that Opera’s location bar does not have an option to paste links directly into the location bar. In order to paste a link into the location bar, you need to hit the symbol key, which brings up an edit screen pre-populated with ’www.’ You need to erase the www, and then you can paste your link in.
That lengthy process completely kills any satisfaction you may get out of having a workable browser on a Blackberry. And none of it is Opera’s fault. On most other OSes, clicking URLs in any application will fire up the default browser and retrieve the URL. Hell, on iPhone OS, you can set up protocol handlers that will open up other apps. Hopefully RIM will provide a means for applications to talk to each other soon. Creating the seamless interaction between apps is probably even more important than pushing App World.