Opera Labs have been busy porting their mobile browser, Opera Mini, to Google’s Android platform, prompting suggestion that the app will become the obvious choice for manufacturers looking to add internet browsing to their Android handsets.  In a comprehensive post on the official Opera Labs blog - which includes a guide to installing the browser in emulator bundling with the Android SDK - Chris Mills describes the difficulty in developing a version for the still-fledgling mobile OS, particularly when they too lack access to an Android prototype to develop on.  Perhaps they should speak to Texas Instruments about the company’s upcoming sub-$1,000 reference platform!

According to Mills, Opera Mini is potentially a better match to mobile devices than the rudimentary WebKit browser components included in Android, with the dual benefits of faster rendering and quicker downloads:

“[T]he Opera Mini browser renders web pages that have been transcoded to the binary OBML format, meaning much smaller downloads and a faster browsing experience on mobiles, than would be provided by other browsers (the Android WebKit-based browser component has a switch in the public API allowing the use of a transcoding proxy that transcodes web pages to a simpler form of HTML. Whether this is as small and fast as Opera Mini’s OBML remains to be seen.)” Chris Mills, Opera Labs

Last month Opera announced their first deal with a US carrier, making Opera Mini available free on Helio’s Ocean smartphone. 

[via mocoNews]