Verizon Opera Mini

I don't look very often, but yesterday I decided to check the Verizon apps store on my enV Touch and discovered "Verizon Opera Mini". It's free, so I downloaded it to give it a try. My evaluation after using it off and on for the past 18 hours follows:

It starts up very fast (about 3 seconds from touching the icon on my shortcuts screen to the browser being ready) and has a friendly, 9 square shortcut page where you can save your most favorite sites. It feels like pages load faster than in Polaris.

The browser itself works vertically on the touch screen and horizontally with the phone flipped open, but does not rotate the display if you attempt to view on the touch screen horizontally.

The touch screen keyboard is a little different from the Polaris keyboard, but overall it's good. The only major problem I've encountered was that Opera Mini would not open a YouTube video into the media player like Polaris does.

Overall, I like Verizon Opera Mini, and will need to use it more before I make any final decision on Opera Mini vs. Polaris.

FYI - My phone is running V09 firmware.