Opera have announced that a beta version of the Opera Mini 5 browser has now been released to the Android Market.  Opera Mini 5 uses Opera’s compression tech, which redirects webpage requests through the company’s servers where they are compressed to reduce their size, before they are sent back to your mobile.  The idea being that pages load quicker, although there are compromises in that images are also compressed.

Some of the features of Opera Mini 5 include- tabbed browsing, a download manager and “Speed Dial”, which is essentially just a bookmarking method.  Opera claim that the browser loads pages faster due to page sizes being compressed by up to 90% by their servers before it reaches your phone.

Opera’s timing is certainly good with an Android version of Fennec still a long way off.  We’d still rather have Opera Mobile rather than Mini, but more browser choice certainly isn’t a bad thing.  It’ll be interesting to see how this browser performs.

The full list of features is available at the Opera site.