The non-Beta version of Opera Mobile 10.1 for Symbian was released today.  It supports S60 3rd Edition, S60 5th edition (aka Symbian^1) and Symbian^3 devices. Like all of the Opera 10 Symbian variants, it needs a fair amount of free RAM, at least 40 MB and  70 MB or more  for best results. Download it from opera.com/mobile/download/ or m.opera.com (mobile).

The main changes in this release are said to be increased stability and more localized versions.  There’s a  full change log on the Opera Mobile Blog.

I’ve been looking for a better browser for my Nokia N8 ever since I got the phone. The current Symbian^3 browser is quite poor with tiny, ugly fonts, no  text reflow on zoom, the inability to open a link in a new tab, missing geolocation support and poor JavaScript performance. A better browser is supposed to be coming from Nokia.  It was originally promised for this year  but I heard at Tech.Ed that it’s been delayed until February, 2011.  In the meantime I’ve been using the the Java version of Opera Mini 5.1 as my main browser on the N8.  I tried Opera Mobile 10 and both of the 10.1 Beta’s but had problems with text columns not fitting screen width and  crashing when used with the native keyboard or Swype. Needless to say I was eager to see if the new release fixed these issues.

The good news is that the crashing using Swype and the Nokia keyboard does seem to be (mostly, see update) fixed.  With the previous Opera Mobile releases on the N8, I could induce a browser crash almost immediately when entering addresses or typing in Web forms using the Nokia keyboard, but with this one I haven’t had any crashes in several hours of browsing. Update: WapReview reader Niels discovered that  Opera Mobile still crashes on his C7 with the Nokia keyboard if predictive text is enabled and you press the on-screen right arrow key. I’ve confirmed that the same thing happens on the N8.

The text wrap issue is still present, however. At 100% zoom, text columns do fit page width on almost every site. However text is too small for me to read easily at 100% on many sites (image above left). Opera seems to realize this and defaults to 160% zoom when first installed on the N8.  That makes text readable but has the unfortunate side-effect of making text columns wider than screen width on some sites, including my favorite Twitter web client, dabr.co.uk (image above, center).

There is a way to get readable text in Opera Mobile 10.1 without  losing fit to width. You just need to use Opera’s advanced configuration utility (opera:config) to do this.  It quite easy:

• Enter opera:config in the URL address bar
• Tap the Quick find field, and enter font (image below, left).
  
• Scroll down to the bottom of the page, tap the Minimum Font Size field and change the value (which defaults to 11) to something larger.  I find that 17 works well (image below, right).
• Press the Save button at the bottom of the screen.

With minimum font size set to 17,  text is readable and  fit to width works on just about every web page, including Dabr (image above, right).  There is one downside though that keeps me from using this workaround. Increasing the minimum font size has the unfortunate side effect of making some non-text elements like tabs and bordered divs expand beyond the limits of their containers to overlap other elements. It doesn’t happen on every site but when it does its quite ugly and even makes some pages unusable by blocking controls. For example, on the WordPress administration pages  the overlap covers up some of checkboxes making them impossible to click (image below, right).

Opera Mobile 10. feels fast and I had hoped to be able to compare its JavaScript performance with that of the Nokia browser. I ran the Sunspider and V8 JavaScript benchmarks on Opera Mobile 10.1 and got what I think are pretty impressive numbers for a mobile browser. Unfortunately the Nokia browser was unable to run either benchmark so a direct comparison isn’t possible.

In spite of the issues with font sizes and text wrap, I consider Opera 10.1, with its fast page loads, excellent JavaScript performance, support for geolocation and quite a few HTML5 and CSS3 attributes, to be the best direct browser for the N8.  I think I’m going to start using it as my main browser, with default minimum font size of 11 and 160% zoom,  For the sites with word-wrap issues, like Dabr, I’ll continue to use Opera Mini.