The wait is over for the next official release of Opera Mini, today Opera Mini 4.1 stepped from beta to an official release. As usual the download is free, just hop on over to operamini.com and and click free download to be on your way. With this version of Opera Mini there are 3 main focuses: full HTML web browsing, Syncing bookmarks with your desktop version of Opera 9.5 beta, and delivering 50% faster web browsing.

Our personal favorite improvement over the past versions of Opera Mini is the ability to search for text within a Web Page. While this may not seem like a big deal for smartphone owners out there, when you are using a 1 inch screen on your flip phone, being able to skip to portion of the web page you need is priceless. If we had to rank a second top feature, it would be the improvements made to the CSS handling for websites (especially our site). The biggest problem with browsing the Internet on your phone is that the CSS support is usually dated and unless the page was written for mobile phones, it generally looks horrible on the phone.

For those of you with BlackBerry devices, you will need to be running firmware newer than 4.2 in order to use all the features of Opera Mini 4.1.  As usual landscape viewing support is not available on BlackBerry devices in this version of Opera Mini.  On the positive side, downloading attachments works like a charm so you no longer need to worry about having the BlackBerry browser in order to save files easily off the web.

Head on over to operamini.com from your cell phone or simply visit the website on your computer and download a copy.  Alternatively, you can visit the website and have a direct link sent to your phone via SMS.