Opera Mini 5 Beta for Android arrived this morning for the world to try. While it does not support native multi-touch, there are a few benefits to the browsing experience that will make it, if not my default browser (xScope performs that function admirably) then my heavy-image, desktop browser replacement.

The reason for this is that it is fast. Opera routes traffic through its proxy server before delivering content to your device, compressing images and optimizing page layout to best suit your particular device. I have used Opera Mini 5 Beta 2 on my Blackberry 9700 for months now and consider it to be, by far, the closest thing to a usable browser on the platform.

Android, thankfully, does not suffer from this problem, as there are at least four very usable, very attractive and standards-compliant browsers available in the app market. Opera Mini 5 arrives into a crowded market, but it should flourish through its speed and brand name recognition. At the least, people will download it and forget about it, though I truly hope they don’t.

This is an early beta from the company, and the experience should improve with time. The browser lacks native multitouch, though its zoom functionality is very good; it reacts to text alignment with accuracy, and because it is limited to only two views (zoomed in and zoomed out) the page never has to re-jig itself to realign the text around the images, like other browsers do. This ensures scrolling is always fast, and never stutters (the native Android browser is guilty of this inefficiency).

The other major issue is lack of font customization. The default font is an ugly Arial-knockoff that diminishes the readability of text-heavy sites like The New York Times.

Below is a blurry walkthrough (all I had on me was my Blackberry for video) so I apologize for the lack of clarity and sorry for turning the phone on its side to take the video,  I hope you don’t strain too much to see it.

Download Opera Mini 5 for Android in the Marketplace, or by heading to http://m.opera.com/next in your Android browser.

Watch the video walk through: