Opera Mini 3

· technology ·

Opera Mini 3.0 has just been released, and has some really nice features. I've used it before on my mobile phone, but it now allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds as well, which is a nice addition. It's fast, displays pages in a nice, clean way, and now collapses navigation links so that you don't have to scroll past pages of navigation to get to the content. Prompted by the nice experience of reading RSS feeds on a mobile, I got around to setting up NewsGator to publish mobile feeds. It's very easy: NewsGator allows you to have a number of different 'Locations' which are really just different methods for publishing feeds. I already use one to publish the blog links in the sidebar here, and there's one already set up (though not activated) for mobile use. You just select a PIN number, and it provides a URL for you to visit from a mobile browser (which avoids the annoyance of having to enter a username and password in a mobile browser).

It works really well, and if you mark feeds as read on your phone, that state gets synched to NewsGator and NetNewsWire. I got so engrossed with reading my feeds on the train last Thursday -- in particular Jason Kottke's fascinating piece about super-cooled beer (mmmm... super-cooled beer...) -- that I nearly missed my stop. Luckily, the woman in the inside seat asked me if I could move so she could get out, and I realised I needed to get out too. Other than the danger of missing your stop, reading feeds on your phone is a great way to pass a few minutes on public transport.