Viewing Web Pages On The Tilt Cell Phone - Opera Web Browser - Part 1

We tried to download the Opera browser for the AT&T tilt cell phone today. It was an undertaking that I was trying to put off but not being able to surf the web like a computer on such an advanced phone like the Tilt Cell phone was frustrating. We decided to go with the 30 day free trial to see how hard it was to install and because some of the questions we were unsure of the answers on. We found no relative results when searching for Installing Opera On AT&T Tilt Cell Phone.

The first step was to go get the browser (www.opera.com). I thought that I would just go to the website and download the browser on the phone. Makes sense right? Wrong.

The first thing I noticed was how user unfriendly the website was for mobile devices. For a company that offers such a sophisticated browser, their website should at least detect that I have a smart phone or mobile phone and send me to a different page. Oh well.

Once we got to the download page, we had to choose between two different versions of the mobile Opera Browser. I was confronted with a question about which version of Windows Mobile was running on the phone. This is not an obvious question for most newbies but most advanced users should not have a problem with this question. The AT&T Tilt Cell phone uses Microsoft Windows Mobile 6 (to find out on most windows mobile devices go to Start, Settings, About).

The next question that is asked is what type of phone do you have. The choices are for a Smart Phone and a Pocket PC. Most average consumers might not know which one to choose. If you have questions I suggest you Google your phones model number. They say that if your phone has a touch screen, you need the Pocket PC version. Since the AT&T Tilt cell phone has a touch screen my choice was easy.

The toughest question in the download process and most confusing was they wanted me to choose what type of device I have. The cryptic options that were presented where:
All Devices (CAB) or All Devices (MSI). This was a little confusing because both say “All devices”. I would suggest Opera put something online or in the download process that explains this choice a little better but we choose the default one, and clicked “download”. The page changed to a blank webpage and appeared to load a new page. I could see progress in the download bar of the browser, and all appeared to be well.

About 45 seconds passed while we waited for the download, I wondered if I should have done this on a desktop machine, and then synched the phone to the computer, and moved the file over this way… Again Opera should have detected my cellphone and sent me to an error page if this is the case. Anyways, I convinced myself to wait it out, sometimes pages do take a while to load on the phone.. The cell phones’ screen did its automatic “sleep” function; we made the display come back on by pressing the power button a couple of times.

A few moments later, the browser appeared to be done. I could see the “Back” and “Menu” buttons on the bottom, which usually means the page is done loading. We were a little confused since nothing ever asked me to install. We went to “Programs” and didn’t see the new browser listed.

We will return to this later, I have invested more than an hour in this install and documentation process so stay tuned