Opera Mini: Where have you been all my recently?

I was discouraged when the Google Personalized Homepage (mobile version) did not render on my Razr V3’s built-in browser. (The error, for those of you finding this via search, is “413: Page Cannot Be Displayed.”)

To my rescue comes Opera Mini, which apparently has been free for a while now. It’s a Java web browser (all in a tiny 97k download) that runs circles around its built-in counterpart, rendering pages that the other would barf on. It works great with the personalized homepage, and with Google Reader’s mobile version as well.

The one problem I had getting it to work on my Cingular Razr is that it kept timing out on the GPRS connections and I’d get a 3.0.1:80 error. I think I have lousy GPRS reception in my apartment. Enough trying and sitting at different angles helped, and also possibly inputting these settings into the e-mail app’s GPRS configuration (of all places). That might just have been me thrashing, however.