Opera Mini available for Android

Opera Labs has posted their experience so far porting their popular mobile browser, Opera Mini, to the Android platform. Opera's Chris Mill's discusses the porting process:

How did we do it? We decided to use the existing Opera Mini code base (even the binary package) instead of creating a separate port, to save on resourses. We created a special wrapper that translates Java ME (mostly MIDP) API calls into Android API calls. The tool used was MicroEmulator - this is an open source (LGPL) implementation of Java ME that runs on top of Java SE. The lead Opera Mini Android developer is also the lead developer of MicroEmulator, so it was an inspired choice! The Android platform is similar to Java SE, with the exception of several libraries normally included in Java SE (like AWT/Swing - these are excluded because they would likely be too heavy to fit into the embedded environment.) It is therefore fairly simple to port MicroEmulator to run inside Android environment. The only major task was to replace the AWT/Swing graphics backend of MicroEmulator with Android specific APIs.

You can try it yourself by downloading the APK, or take a look at a screenshot and more details on its entry in the application db. I've tried it out, and it works, but it did crash on me and was overall a bit slow. I'm a die-hard Opera fan on the desktop, so look forward to them getting their popular mobile version tuned for Android!