Posts tagged 4
by Ben Lopez
Another week, another recap. So, who pre-ordered iPhone 4? Not many of us, I imagine, seeing as it sold out in an afternoon (don’t feel bad, I missed it too). But you’ve heard that already, let’s get to what you may not have heard this past week:
This week’s highlights:
We have a lot of social media going on in our life these days, don’t we? While it’s sometimes convenient and enjoyable, there’s a whole lotta noise making its way in with all those spammy Twitter updates, and damned Farmville notifications every 5 seconds. I take a look at the top annoyances and how you can avoid them.
I share a great classic quote from Walt Disney on your work in relation to the time you spend with your family. Family first, don’t let them slip away as you get caught up in your work.
My good friend Phil Ricci shared a story that I thought was just completely ludicrous; the New York Times apparently things we’re just completely unprofessional to use the word “tweet”. My question to them: what the hell else are you going to call it? See my full response here.
Last, but certainly not least, a little something for iPhone users in celebration of the iPhone 4 this past week. I’d been wanting to do it for a while, so I finally set aside some time to do an in-depth review of Opera Mini for iPhone. Is it really “six times faster” as they claim? Speed tests are explained in the review.
For tomorrow’s post, I wanted to get back to a more core business focus for a while, but damn it all, after reading one of the Tumblr staff blogs, it absolutely requires a response. Don’t miss this one…
Oh, and if anyone happens to have a recommendation left at this point (unlikely) and would like to be kind to Dimes To Dollars, you can do so in the tech, startups, or entrepreneurs category by clicking on the respective link. Thanks for reading!^_^
PS: Special thanks to Jon Lopez Photography for the awesome Dimes To Dollars Photo shoot!
by Ben Lopez
Opera Mini made a nice splash in tech blogs, and as a top trend on Twitter when it launched in April. I thought it was a little buggy, but performed well overall. After allowing some time for an update (and it has been updated), I sat down for some serious Opera time to deliver an in-depth review.
My initial impressions are that it’s not a bad browser. The interface is very nice, and in fact I preferred it slightly to Safari’s. For instance, it’s nice to have a reload button in the fixed dock, so I don’t have to scroll to the top to reload as in Safari. Tabbed browsing appears a bit wonky at first with the shuffle animation that is used, but it’s very solid.
Another nice feature is a clean, simple home screen that imitates the desktop version of Safari’s “Top Sites” screen as a spot for favourites. This is strangely absent on Safari.
Speed Tests: I tried a variety of sites for speed tests, with fairly consistent results. Opera was almost always faster, though not even close to their “up to 6x faster broswing” claim. Six times faster than what? Here are two basic examples to give you an idea of the speed comparison:
-Graphics-heavy webite (ncsx.com): Safari: 11.08 seconds, OM 7.69 seconds
-Light-graphics website (twitter.com): Safari: 7.18 seconds, OM 6.83 seconds
So good interface, good speed, but the browsing falls just a little short. The biggest problem here is that there’s no control over how far you can zoom in, it is entirely automatic. So essentially any other site that is not in neat columns become very cumbersome to navigate due to this. Clicking links is also strangely spotty, and does not always proceed to load the page. Other small annoyances include defaulting to load the “mobile” version of many sites, not the “touch” or full versions, and occasionally not resizing to fit the screen.
While it holds a sleek interface and is quite speedy, there’s no substitution for elegant navigation. If they can tweak the touch sensitivity and give us more control over our zoom, I certainly think it can hold it’s own. But for the time being, stick with Safari.
GRADE: C-
