While many people set up their mobile phone – such as rooting an Android, for example – to allow for tethering and accessing the cellular data network with a PC, it is a practice that is generally frowned upon by the mobile providers. However, there are times when you’re just desperate for Internet access, and you need the larger screen that your laptop offers.

In previous articles, I’ve described how you can tether your rooted Android phone to your laptop, and Dave described how you can tether a jailbroken iPhone in much the same way. My preferred method of tethering is using the awesome Wireless tether app that I mentioned recently.

Installing The Emulator

Once you have that tether enabled, and you’ve got your Wireless data Internet connection activated on your phone, the following guide will help you to conserve bandwidth so that you won’t draw too much attention to yourself while surfing.

The first step is to install a mobile phone emulator – a few options include using the Android developer SDK that has an emulator tool, or you can install the Sun Java Wireless Toolkit from Sun which includes a good emulator as well. The simplest solution is to install the MicroEmulator program to your PC.

You will need Java Runtime Environment (JRE) installed on your system (if you don’t already). When you launch the MicroEmulator, it won’t look like anything at all special at first. It basically looks like a cellphone with a mobile screen. First, make sure you’ve enabled Internet access by clicking on “Options” and then make sure “MIDlet Network Access” is checked.

The beauty of this emulator is that it’ll run most mobile browsers like Bolt or Opera Mini. As far as I know, Opera Mini is just about the easiest to install – all you have to do is download the JAD and JAR files at the Opera download page. Save them somewhere you’ll remember, preferably in the “devices” folder in the MicroEmulator application directory. Then, you can load up the Opera Mini browser inside the emulator by clicking on File and then “Open MIDlet File…”

You will see “Opera Mini” appear on the main screen under the list of devices. To launch the mobile browser, just select it and click “Start”. The Opera Mini browser will launch just like you’re running it on your own mobile device – along with the streamlined bandwidth that you’d be using if you were actually using your phone.

While this is pretty cool – it isn’t good enough. The whole point of using your computer or laptop is to take advantage of the large screen, right? Let’s resize the display window to a wider display. In MicroEmulator, you do this by clicking on Options and “Select Device…”

Select “Resizable device” and then click on “Add…“  You’ll see a list of devices to choose from. Click the mobile browser you’ve installed, and then type in the size of the window that you would like.

Once you launch Opera Mini again, it’ll now be in a larger window with the size parameters you set.  Make sure to go into the Opera Mini browser settings and enable “Fullscreen” mode and enable “Load images” and set “Image quality” to medium for an optimal browsing experience. Just because you’re browsing over a mobile network with your laptop doesn’t mean you can enjoy it a little!

Now, when you launch any page that has a mobile version, you’ll notice that the site “senses” you’re using a WAP connection and will serve up the mobile version of the page – cutting down your overall bandwidth significantly. Here’s the main page of MUO displayed through this Opera Mini browser running on my laptop.

Clicking on one of the articles, the page loaded in just seconds, used only about 300 KB to fully load the page.

Loading it in a regular browser consumes over 1.5MB of bandwidth.  You can imagine how the data consumption can pile up over time if you don’t use a mobile browser to take care of your Internet needs while you’re on the road.

I am not encouraging anyone to break the terms and rules of their contract, however there are a lot of people that specifically sign contracts that allow tethering, but usage is on a metered basis. The method described above will allow you the convenience of using the nice widescreen of your laptop, while maintaining a lower data usage that won’t break your bank account.

So, give the MicroEmulator with Opera Mini a try and see if it opens up your world to new, mobile possibilities. Do you find that using a mobile browser is too limiting? Are there other mobile browsers that work well with MicroEmulator? Share your own experiences in the comments section below.

Today, we’re going to decide which mobile Internet browsers is the best out there. After much research, I have narrowed it down to the top two, the Opera Mini and SkyFire browsers. If you’re tired of your mobile device’s stock browser, these are more than capable alternatives.

In this article, I am going to cover what these mobile Internet browsers have to offer, detailing their key features, supported operating systems, and whatever else I can find to be useful for all of your mobile browsing needs.

[Note]: Last year, Jeffry gave us 5 Mini Browsers For Mobile Phones, so mobile browsing has been a viable topic for some time now. If you really want to explore the past, check out Aibek’s Browsing Web on your Mobile Phone article from April of 2008. Mobile devices have changed dramatically since this time, so let’s explore what’s changed in mobile browsing.

Opera Mini

Supports

• BlackBerry
• iPhone/iPod/iPad
• Windows Mobile
• Android
• Java phones

The Opera Mini browser, which we covered back in May, is easily one of the best alternatives out there. It supports almost every mobile device you can think of, including everything made by Blackberry, Apple, Google, and Windows. It is one of the better mobile browsers in general and it has some great features.

The browser supports tabs, synchronization of bookmarks, speed dials, integrated search engines, saved pages for offline viewing, and password management. Also, Opera Mini uses only a tenth of the bandwidth of other browsers, compressing webpages by up to 90%. This can save you time and money, especially if you’re on a per-usage mobile data plan.

As you can see, the Opera Mini has a very simplistic layout with a lot of added functionality. If your mobile device is touch screen, you can take advantage of scrolling and zooming features as well. This is very useful if you like to have multiple tabs open at one time.

You can view all of Opera Mini’s (and Opera Mobile’s) features here.

To download Opera Mini, use your phone’s default browser to visit m.opera.com. You can find more options here.

SkyFire

Supports

• Android
• Windows Mobile
• Nokia/Symbian (Series 60)

The SkyFire mobile Internet browser has come a long way since we first covered it back in December 2008. It supports bookmarks, pinch-to-zoom, and visual multi-tab browsing, for starters. Tabbed scrolling is very similar to the Safari browser on the iPhone, and you can scroll between up to 8 screens.

With its new SkyBar (SkyFire 2.0), the browser will catch flash videos on a given page, giving you the option to watch them in full screen. That’s right, SkyFire plays flash web video.

If that’s not enough to interest you, SkyFire enables you to see related videos, trends, tweets, and images linked to the pages you’re viewing. There is a built-in option that allows you to toggle between a website’s mobile site and the regular, full site. You can also share articles on Facebook and Twitter with this browser.

To see some of the features of SkyFire 2.0 for Android, check out this video:

To download SkyFire, select your device and follow the instructions here.

Conclusion

This article was originally going to be about the top 5 or 10 mobile Internet browsers out there, but other browsers simply couldn’t match up to these two juggernauts. The default mobile browsers that come with our cell phones, like Safari and IE, are good but not supported by other devices (for obvious reasons).

If I had to pick a winner, I would go with the Opera Mini browser here, although SkyFire has taken huge strides and is getting better all the time. It will be interesting to see which mobile browser tops my list once all the other big names (like Firefox) start catching up and are supported by more and more devices.

What is your favorite mobile browser? Do you have any opinion you would like to share? Leave a comment below and get the debate started!

We’ve discussed mobile browser alternatives before, and Opera Mini browser download – the mobile version of the brand – is one of them. But it has evolved so much since then. It even has an iPhone version to stand alongside Safari.

Now let’s see several things that you can do to optimize your mobile browsing experience by downloading the Opera Mini browser.

Optimized For The Small Screen

The first thing is installation. To quickly acquire Opera Mini for your mobile device, point your default phone browser to m.opera.com or get.opera.com and your phone type will be detected and the download link to a compatible version will appear.

Opera Mini is available for most modern mobile phones. But if your phone isn’t supported, you will get the link to download the previous version.

After installation, open the browser to start browsing the web. You will see that, beyond the simplicity, Opera Mobile’s interface is indeed designed for the small screen.

You will see nine boxes on the Start Page. Opera calls them speed dial. The purpose is to give users quick customizable access to their most visited sites. Users can press one of the “dial” buttons to quickly go to a site.

So the first thing that you can do to optimize your mobile browsing experience is to add your favorite sites to the speed dial. Just click one of the empty grey boxes with the plus sign inside and you can type in the address of the site(s) that you want to add to the speed dial.

Ordinary browsing is similar to what you normally do on the ordinary browser: just type in the site URL, and click “Go“.

On the lower part of the screen, there are the usual browser buttons: back and forward (the left and right arrows), refresh (circular arrow), tabs, and tools.

Opera Mini is capable of opening several tabs at once. All you have to do is to click the tab button; and after the tab bar is opened, click the plus button to add a new address.

But please bear in mind that opening several tabs at once will drain your phone’s memory and might slow down (or even crash) your phone.

The Tools Of The Trade

The tool button contains several common browser tools: Bookmarks, History, Start Page, Saved Pages, Downloads, Settings, Find in Page, Help,

And Exit at the very bottom of the screen.

Some of these buttons are so common that they need no further explanation. But there are also some that are a little bit special like the “Start Page” button. This is the button that you need to click to customize the start page that we mentioned before.

“Settings” is the place to customize several things on Opera Mini to better suit your tastes and need. For example, if you prefer to have every inch of your phone’s screen property for the webpage, turn on the “Fullscreen” option.

You can also choose the size of the font used in the browser’s display. A larger font size means better readability, but – in my humble opinion – an uglier look of the page.

The “Privacy” settings deal with things like passwords, cookies and history. Those who really concern about safety would want to tinker with these options a little bit further.

“Help” might be the least visited place for most users, but there’s a sweet surprise waiting inside.

You can find a list of shortcuts inside Help that you can use to quickly access Opera Mini’s functions, including the sites in speed dial. These shortcuts are nice time savers, especially for those who uses phones with physical buttons.

So, have you tried Opera Mini? Do you have any quick tips to use this cool phone browser?  Please share using the comments below.