Running Opera Mini 4.1 on Windows Mobile

As many of you may already know, Opera Mini is one of the best browsers out there for  mobile devices.  For us Tilt users there is one problem, the Tilt/TyTN II is not officially supported.  But don’t let that get you down, it actually works fine on the Tilt/TyTN II and many other Windows Mobile devices that are not listed on Opera’s site.

If you go to Opera Mini’s forums you will find that plenty of people post asking for help running it on a Windows Mobile device.  There is even a guide called The Symbian/Windows Mobile MIDlet (Java) Bible, but many find that this is too technical and very hard to understand.  The following guide is meant for the average, everyday phone user. 

If you do not use Opera Mini I would recommend you give it a try, its free and works great.  If you are still using Pocket Internet Explorer, you don’t know what your missing out on!  For those of you who want something like the iPhone browser, this is the closest you are going to get for a while.

Download a Signed Version
If you have tried Opera Mini, you already know it is very annoying to say “yes, but ask next time” to give the application permission to connect to the Internet.  Using a signed version of the application tells the device that Opera Mini is not malicious software and is safe.  If you use a signed version of the application, you will be given the option “yes, this time and every time in the future”(or something along those lines) and that message wont come up again.

Signed versions of Opera Mini are available on their web site, but it is not easy to find them.  Use pocket Internet Explorer to browse to http://mini.opera.com.  Do not click the download link, instead click the like “If this version fails…”.  Then choose the first link on the next page, multiple certificates seems to work best for Windows Mobile.

Create shortcuts and make links open w/ Opera Mini
One of the problems with it being a java MIDlet rather than a Windows Mobile application is that it doesn’t make Start Menu shortcuts and other programs don’t open links with Opera Mini.  Luckily there is a (rather difficult) fix, but I have created installer files that should make this much simpler.

When a java MIDlet is installed, it goes in the folder /windows/appdb and is given a application database number.  You will need to go to this folder and locate the Opera file’s number before continuing.  Open “File Browser” and go to the folder /windows/appdb.  You will need to look at the file called “s#_Suite”, replacing # with the various numbers you will see.  Find the one that has the date that you installed Opera Mini (If you did not install it today, you may want to re-install to make this step a bit easier).

Now, if your installation of Opera Mini went to s1, you will need to to select the cab file in the zip that is named “cab for s1.cab”(whatever number you found to be opera is the one you will choose, for me it was s1 and that is what is used in this example) and install it to make the shortcut and set Opera Mini as the default browser.

This is a modified version of Shlomki’s mortscript which I found here.
My source for the Start Menu shortcut is here.

At this point I must apologize for the rather long post.  I tired to keep this as simple and short as possible.  For more details, I will be making a similar post  on The TiltSite Wiki with more details (and more pictures maybe?).  If you have any questions feel free to comment.  If you think I have made a mistake somewhere tell me and I will fix it.

Written by Ryan · Filed Under Mobile Browsers, Software 
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