Opera Mini on Blackberry Classic Phone
created May 25, 2018
Dec 19, 2018 update: I learned today that the Blackberry Classic was an actual model name for the Blackberry, and it was released in 2014. The Blackberry Classic still contained the physical keyboard and trackpad, but it also offered a touchscreen. The old Blackberry mentioned below was not a "Classic". The one below was more of a lowercase "classic". In the text below, I removed the word "Classic".
May 25, 2018 post:
This spring (yep, in 2018), I asked my wife to dig out her old Blackberry phone that she used for work at the beginning of this decade. It was her second Blackberry, at least, that work gave her. She last used the phone for work around 2012. I'm unsure of the version or model of the Blackberry.
We did not have a charger for the phone, but the power cord that charges my Amazon Echo works for the Blackberry.
After charging the phone, I reset it. I was surprised that the reset process worked. The phone has WiFi capabilities, and I connected it to our home router.
The old photos still exist on the phone's memory card.
Today, I use the Blackberry for playing around, web surfing, seeing how websites function. Actually, most websites are too bloated and obnoxiously designed to function in the default, limited Blackberry web browser. "Back in the day," the Blackberry was used primarily as an email and texting machine by business people.
The Blackberry contains two web browsers: Web2Go and Hotspot. Those were the names. I could not determine a difference between the two browsers. Both were accessed via the same home screen icon.
My simple, JavaScript-free websites displayed fine within the Blackberry web browser, especially kleete.com and sora.soupmode.com. But I'm doing something a little different in the CSS for sawv.org that caused the pages to display with a small font size and to stretch to the edges of the Blackberry screen. [Jul 24, 2018 update: Duh. It just hit me. At sawv.org, I'm styling most of the page typography by using the HTML5 article tag. But that type of styling is applied to the body tag at sora.soupmode.com and at kleete.com.]
When I viewed my website https://soupmode.com with the Blackberry browser, the site displayed, but other SSL/TLS websites did not display. The browser produced two different types of errors. One included the following text: "Unable to connect using the current security settings".
This morning, I used the Blackberry limited web browser to visit m.opera.com, and shockingly, the Opera Mini web browser installed successfully. I think that it's Opera Mini version 8.
I can web surf better with Opera Mini. No errors for SSL/TLS sites. And Opera Mini has more support or better support for HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript.
A few years ago, like 2013 or early 2014, I installed the Opera Mini web browser on the featured phone that I used. The phone was a landscape flip phone that offered a full keyboard. I moved around on the web browser screen by using the arrow keys, I think. It did not have WiFi access.
The Opera Mini browser is an impressive project, at least for installing on old, non-smartphones.
I like the design of the Blackberry phone. Small size, physical keyboard, web browser, and WiFi. I'd like to use this phone as my primary phone for calls and texting. Or maybe purchase an unlocked, "newer" Blackberry. I would have to switch carriers from Verizon to AT&T.
One issue with the Opera Mini on the Blackberry. It seems that Opera Mini displays all text in the same font size. It ignores the different font sized defined in my CSS for headings. It ignores the <small> HTML tag, which might be deprecated anyway.
Oddly, this website, sora.soupmode.com, displays better in the default Blackberry web browser than in Opera Mini. The Blackberry browser displays my Sora test site similar to how it displays in Chrome. The Opera Mini ignores the line height and font color settings, it seems. In the Opera Mini, the text appears too dark and too scrunched together.
But the Opera Mini makes it possible to visit other websites on the old Blackberry.