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Sure, Opera Mini may (or may not<\/a>) already be the most popular mobile browser in the world — but why stop there? Following up on the Android release of Opera Mobile 4 just over a year ago<\/a>, Opera has just launched Opera Mini 5 for Android into public beta.<\/p>\n The jump from version 4 to version 5 is pretty huge, introducing a handful of features that Opera says “makes your mobile browsing experience as close as it can be to your desktop experience.”<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n The biggest change here is probably the introduction of tabbed browsing — a must, given that just about every default smartphone browser supports it out of the box at this point. <\/p>\n Some of the other big new features:<\/strong><\/p>\n Is Opera Mini 5 a worthy contender to the default Android browser? I’d say so. Opera Mini’s primary selling point is that they pipe everything through a data compression proxy before sending it to your handset. For those days when 3G just isn’t as fast as it should be, it’ll save you time; for those of us not on unlimited data plans, it’ll save some money. Alas, the current Beta doesn’t support multi-touch, which may very well be a deal-killer for some<\/p>\n Still: throw in Opera Mini 5’s seemingly rock solid build quality and its pretty dang decent UI, and I’d say it’s worth giving it a serious test session at the very least. Look for it in the Android App Market.<\/p>\n\n