Opera Mini 4 and McDonalds

Sunday, 30 March, 2008

I’ve been using Opera Mini 4 on my Palm TX for a while now and it is very slick at viewing websites. Its not a “one-size-fits-all” product but for certain niches its excellent. The browser is Java based (so works across platforms) and uses a server to pull in the webpages. For graphically large pages the server produces a screenshot which you can then zoom in to. Not too bad overall. It is fast and works well. The downside is that there is no way you can use this to log in to a wifi access point. Which means the fall back of Palm’s default Blazer browser which works just fine, but isnt as fast.

I was in McDonalds this week and tried to access my email; no joy as I needed to log in. McDonalds have an agreement with The Cloud to provide free wifi access (thank you!) but you’ve needed to provide your postcode and name in the past. So I tried Opera today and much to my surprise it worked. Clearly The Cloud arent blocking the ports Opera Mini uses. I then tried Blazer which, as expected, redirected me to The Cloud login page. And, thankfully, no longer are login details needed. Just click on the “Free Wifi” link (agreement to the T&Cs) and wifi is then fully available.

This is really very good. I have found public wifi access points painful to use on a PDA but, with iPhone’s now so popular, maybe operators are smartening up a bit

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