At one point you may actually think that the Opera Mini team is competing with the Opera Mobile team. For what is just a mobile Java application Opera Mini 5 comes with so many compelling features it might actually dethrone your original phone´s browser.

While Opera Mini 4 was a complete rewrite, Opera Mini 5 builds on top of this solid new base and adds features from the Opera desktop browser to this little Java (or rather J2ME) champion. Of course existing features are still there, such as the core technology known as Opera Turbo to compress and render web sites server side.

Opera Mini 5 comes with four key features: tabbed browsing, Speed Dial, a redefined touch and keypad UI, and a password manager. I imagine all of this features are warmly welcomed as they are already key features of the desktop variant. The UI has been refitted and now looks very good, which should fit well even with Windows Mobile and Android phones (especially those powered by HTC).

Sadly Android and iPhone users cannot yet enjoy this release (although an Android version is in the works), but the others, which is a large portion of non smart phone folks, can! So if you're into mobile browsing you cannot but download this beta and enjoy this release!