According to most of the polling we’ve done, the vast majority of MobileCrunch readers are total smartphone junkies, so it’s probably not too likely any of you guys will be heading in to buy yourself a feature-phone any time soon. If you do, however, we’ve got good news: these things just got ever so slightly better. At least, some of T-Mobile’s did.
Somewhat out of the blue, T-Mobile has opened up a handful of otherwise locked-down feature-phone handsets to the Opera Mini browser.
Why does that matter? Because almost all of the default feature-phone browsers out there are absolutely terrible. They’re slow, clunky, and tend to misrender even the simplest of pages. Opera Mini, however, is about as close as you get to a smartphone browser without, you know, buying a smartphone. Alas, a huge chunk of the feature-phones floating around out there are locked down in such a way that Opera Mini (and other third-party apps) can’t be installed without a good amount of hackery on the user’s end.
If you’ve got a Nokia 2330, Nokia 2720, Nokia 3711, Nokia 5130, Sony Ericsson Equinox, Samsung T239, Samsung T659 and Nokia E73 Mode, you’re in the first wave of handsets that can grab Opera Mini. Head over to m.opera.com and download away.
(Now, T-Mobile: go start putting Opera Mini on all of your dumb phones out of the box. Trust me. Sure, most buyers won’t know what they’re getting — but they’ll unknowingly love you for it.)