Opera has released a new version of its web browser for Java-enabled mobile phones. The free Opera Mobile Mini 2.0 software offers improved access to webmail and mobile news, as well as integrating download functions into the phone.

The browser loads pages faster than a phone's built-in browser, and uses less bandwidth.

Opera Mini uses Opera's proxy servers to quickly render pages, offering text that is readable on small screens and images that download quickly while still maintaining reasonable quality.

An advanced version of Opera Mini also has better compression support for faster downloading, and the ability to store most web pages in memory rather than breaking them into multiple pages.

However, users should be aware of the possible cost of mobile browsing before they get carried away.