I am seriously impressed with Opera Mini 5. I just downloaded it yesterday for my Blackberry 8330, and it’s a phenomenally better browser experience than the standard RIM browser. For mobile optimized pages, the RIM browser is fine…it’s just that if you want to browse some ad hoc pages, you are quite likely to hose the browser and the TCP/IP stack as it attempts to deal with a big page with coding it doesn’t understand.

I didn’t use Opera 4 much, as I just didn’t think it added enough value to use in lieu of the native RIM browser, but Opera 5 is another thing altogether. It seems faster than Opera 4, it offers tabbed browsing, and is truly effective in quickly loading (through its compression of pages thru the Opera server farm) random pages. Opera is not a Blackberry optimized program. It doesn’t alway work the way other BBY apps do, but it works in a way that lets it be platform agnostic.

The only thing that I’ve encountered that I don’t understand (and I don’t know if it’s a beta bug or my not knowing how it works) is that I can’t figure out how to update a Speed Dial site once it’s been set. I believe that to a degree this will be mitigated when Opera 5 gets the synchronization code working (it’s not, to the best I can tell, synchronizing like Opera 4.x does with your Opera account).

Bottom line is that with a browser like this, I feel that I can open any web page I want and see the content quickly, and not worry about crashing the browser/hanging the TCP/IP stack…way to go, Opera!