Russell Beattie

Here's a snippet of conversations going on over at All About Symbian in the "Opera S60 - please give feedback on issues" forum.

At the very top, the product manager for the Series 60 browser talks about some of the issues that users might run into:

2.Unable to run Opera

The browser requires approx 2,4MB of RAM to run and browse full Internet pages in a meaningfull way. Note that this is different from disk space. The 7650/3650 will normally have 2,5MB - 3,2MB of free RAM. If other big applications are open (such as messenger, camera etc), the OS will close them down so Opera can run.

However, there seem to be some applications which will not allow the OS to close them down. If these are running you will always get an out-of-memory message when launching Opera. With one exception, we did not encounter these during our testing so were surprised by your problems. The one we knew of is that an active Bluetooth connection (actually transferring data, not just on) requires about 600KB of memory and it will not be possible to launch the browser at the same time. Not many should run into this.

Dag Olav Norem
Product Line Manager
Opera Software

I met Dag at the All About Symbian pub meet and he was pretty cool. But the app definitely isn't ready for prime time. This forum and the one at Opera are filling up with complaints about the memory issues which make the browser pretty much unusable except only after immediately rebooting the phone (which clears the memory) and then only for a short period before it runs out of memory again.

I'm a bit annoyed because the app seemed so cool at first that I bought two copies! Having to re-install Doris to get a working browser is not the idea. Here's my second reply I just posted:

Hmmm.... I JUST rebooted my 3650 and according to AppMan, I've got 2.64MB free in memory. But this is the absolute ONLY time that I'm able to get this much memory free. Once I start using the phone, the available memory shrinks and seems to keep shrinking. Before I rebooted I had 2.3MB available even after compressing - I'm not even sure why since I don't remember running anything special.

But anyways, if you reboot and have 2.7MB free and Opera won't function with "much less than 2.4MB free," you're leaving us 300k of memory to play with. Since I'm experiencing the fact that phone just won't give back much memory by compressing, this isn't anywhere NEAR being viable as an app I can use daily.

I'm feeling quite a bit mislead as it seems the browser isn't ready for prime time yet, but there was no label of "Beta" on the website. Nowhere in the purchase process (two times) did I see "Your phone needs 2.4MB of available memory in order to function properly" or any other such warnings...

I just spent some time on this Opera forum and it looks like I'm hardly alone in this... Wow.

So what I want is timeframes. Is it going to be possible for you guys to get the browser working in less memory? How long before we see a point release that can help with this stuff?

Like I said, there was no Alpha/Beta label on this product, so I expected it to be working already and having to wait makes me a bit testy. Good thing it works so well (when it's working) otherwise I'd be downright mad.

:-)

I'm really hoping they get this thing working, but something like reducing a memory footprint - especially when they are supposedly using the same engine for their PC browser is going to be tough. I question whether they'll be able to fix it in a reasonable amount of time. Having purchased the app, I want to use it. Not later. Now.

-Russ