Opera Mini 4.0-beta was released today and this seems to be one of the best surprises of the year. It has Javascript, CSS support and zoom-in support similar to the iPhone's, but with all the processing happening to another server instead of your cellphone. Read more for screenshots and info!
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Member since:2005-06-28
You are very wrong. No matter how you rotate, it can make things much slower. From twice slower, to 5 times slower. And given that we are J2ME-dependant here rather than native code that you can control, things will only get worse. More over, Opera Mini is designed to run on phones with 50 Mhz CPUs. Cut the speed 1-5 times, and you are left with an unusable product. Besides, J2ME implementations are too many and too buggy for such tricks.
Sorry, but if I was a product manager at Opera, I would also decide against it. I am pretty sure the subject has come up in their engineering meetings.
Member since:2005-09-20
Opera Mobile does rotate (as in is rotated) on my Nokia N95. Perhaps, Opera could enable the Opera Mini proxy for Opera Mobile too.
No reason why I wouldn't like to have a whooping speed on that device.
Since Opera runs natively, I wouldn't have to expect any speed bumps turning the screen.
Member since:2005-06-28
You are thinking very simplistically. Opera Mobile is NOT Opera Mini. Opera Mobile is a native app which can have hooks to the underlying Symbian functions. Opera Mini can't. More over, the N95 (which I also own), can do rotation itself, because Symbian supports it. Also, the N95 is over 320 Mhz and it has a kick-ass J2ME implementation (the best in the industry). You are in the minority, because most "cheap" phones are between 40 and 100 Mhz. Opera Mini must cater to them because this is where its main strength is: bringing the web on a low-ass phone.
Rotating a web page is somewhat costly, but the cost depends on 2 external factors:
-if the images aren't JPEG, or if they're JPEG but the JPEG decoder can't rotate while decoding, images are expensive to render.
-if the font engine can't rotate while drawing, text becomes expensive to render.
If images can be rotated for cheap/free, and if text-drawing is as speedy at 90 degrees is it is when straight, there's no performance difference at all.
I'd be very surprised if J2ME had such optimizations for image/text decoding. And IF there is ONE or TWO implementations of J2ME that can do that (or even worse, versions of specific implementations), the rest can't. So, the answer is "no", for at least a few more years.
Edited 2007-06-19 22:18
Member since:
2005-11-15
Only if you are not rotating by 90, 180, 270 degrees. On those it is straightforward (like as mirroring).