I am normally a fan of Opera Mini and I use it quite often on my V640i, but yesterday we stumbled on a very wierd string.
A Samsung SGH-E740 (on Device Anywhere, so you can probably try it yourself) has Opera Mini installed and the User-Agent string is Opera/8.01 (J2ME/MIDP; Opera Mini/1.1.7621/hifi/tmobile/uk; Motorola V3; en; U; ssr).
Now WHY is that “Motorola V3″ string there? Surely this is not a Razr V3, surely Opera Mini aspires to be a better browser than the one pre-installed on the Razr V3, so WHY?
I don’t have a clue, of course.
PS: The X-OperaMini-Phone-Ua header is there and has the original User-Agent string.
Hi Andrea.
This is another example string we’ve seen:
Opera/8.01 (J2ME/MIDP; Opera Mini/1.1.3049/hifi/tmobile/uk; SonyEricsson W810i; en; U; ssr)It appears several service providers insert this piece — perhaps to provide some base/identifier for internal services as the Opera browser is generic across devices they manage.
David Harper
That sounds like a pre-installed (in firmware)version of Opera Mini. A very old version at that. At least the UA contains “Opera Mini”
David, your point makes sense, but of course is way less than optimal. Why pre-install Opera Mini and then serve it a poorer experience?
Dennis, I agree with you and in fact my colleague that was testing the device could not find any other browser. I think they installed Opera Mini and removed the native one (or keep it hidden somewhere).
Go figure what’s on operators’ minds!