Pictures from our helicopter ride on Kauai. Ju took most of the pictures since she sat on the front right seat (the best seat on the helicopter!). Stay til the end of the clip to see some of the world’s most dramatic waterfalls side-by-side!
HD version available: Click here and then click on the “full screen” icon to play in 720p HD mode.
Just got back from our 10 day vacation in Hawaii (Oahu and Kauai). Snorkeling there was so good it was unbelievable. Check out the short video below. I took the video using my “underwater” camera and the sound of “darth vader breath” is my own from the snorkel mask. 
Opera Mini 4 is a web browser for mobile phones. I have been using it for a couple of days now, and in terms of usability, Opera Mini beats the Webkit-based browser on my Nokia N80 — It is a “desktop fidelity” browser that delivers “iphone-like” user experience. (Actually, the iphone browser itself is webkit-based too.) And the best of all: Opera Mini is a Java ME application (with a significant server side component). It is one of the most polished Java ME applications I had used.
A “desktop fidelity” browser renders web pages just as they are — there is no attempt to “re-format” a wide web page into a single column (or into WML markup) for mobile display. Reformatting web pages to mobile often renders the page un-readable since the transcoder is not intelligent enough to distinguish important content from the noise (e.g., the ads and long navigation menus etc.) So, a “desktop fidelity” mobile browser first displays the entire width of a web page as a thumbnail on the screen. You can still scroll vertically as you would do in a desktop browser. Here is how the New York Times home page looks like in the Opera Mini 4 browser:
Notice that there is a small box that you can move around on the page. When you clicks on the keypad, the display zooms into the box and you can now view the page content, click on the links etc. Once roomed in, you can also scroll around to see the rest of the page, and/or zoom out to see the page overview.
Of course, the “zoom and view” idea itself is not new. The webkit browser shipped with my Nokia N80 can do this almost one year before the Apple iphone. What make the Opera Mini rock are the implementation details:
* Opera Mini 4 supports the landscape mode as you can see from the above screen shots. That is a huge plus for “zoom and view” browsing since it minimizes the “un-natural” horizontal scrolling when you are zoomed in.
* Opera Mini 4 is backed by a proxy server. When you request a web page, the proxy server goes out to fetch the page first, and it resizes all images before sending them to the phone. That not only makes those images display better on the phone screen, but also saves preciously bandwidth and reduces page load time.
* Opera Mini 4 runs CSS and JavaScript very well. Google ads, ajax data fields, complex CSS-based designs all show up very well in the browser. That is pretty crucial for accessing web 2.0 sites.
* Opera Mini 4 provides an intuitive and very configurable set of keypad shortcuts to access core features and your own bookmarks (it is called “speed dial”). Just dial *1 and watch your favorite web site come up. Very useful for the phone.
* Opera Mini 4 has a very good bookmaking system. You can easily go back and forward in your browsing history and bookmark any page you have accessed. You can even share bookmarks with your Opera browser on the PC.
* Opera Mini 4 provides the iphone-like “slide-out” visual effects when the web page changes. This is a small feature but makes the browser pleasant to use.
All in all, Opera Mini 4 is a very solid mobile browser. Its “desktop fidelity” browsing is a significant improvement over Opera Mini 3, which mostly reformat web pages to a single column mobile page. Having used many Java ME applications and wrote a couple of my own, I am very impressed by the quality of overall user experience delivered by Opera Mini 4. Try it out on your Java phone!