Sree's Tech Blog: Ultimate Competitor of Opera Mini—UC Browser 7.2 Experience Report

Ultimate Competitor of Opera Mini—UC Browser 7.2 Experience Report

From the birth of Opera Mini, it has been standing for the No.1 mobile browser for a long time. However, after 6 years, I think the world is a little bit changed with the entry of another free mobile browser from China, named UC Browser. UC Browser was known as UCWEB, and famous for its fast speed and traffic saving technology, and already has 100 million users.

UC Browser just released its 7.2 international version, many new features had been added in this new version, and here is my experience on it.

1. Fast n Speed as Always!

Personally, I have all of these browsers installed on my N95 and use whichever one is most appropriate to the job at hand under the network of Bhartl. The time consuming to open each site is listed below:

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Brief Sum-up: From the above table and chart, you can see that UC Browser got almost the same speed with Opera Mini, and a little bit faster than Opera Mini, left Bolt, Skyfire and Nokia N95 default browser far behind.

2. How Much Traffic Charge You Can Save With UC Browser?

Be aware of the high charge of traffic for data service, UC Browser introduced a cutting-edge traffic saving technology. According to its official announcement, it can save 85% of the traffic, compare to 80% Opera Mini can do. Here is my test to the Data Compression Rate:

Brief Sum-up: UC Browser could save even more than 85% of your traffic, which will save you're a lot of money spend on your data service.

3. Sharing—The Core Part of SNS

“Sharing” is one of the most important functions in the Mobile Internet. It can not only reduce the churn rate, but also lead the platform to extent. Hence, it is the major battle for mobile hardware and software manufacturers.

UC Browser 7.2 has a big feature for sharing, which is called “Capture & Share”. When you want to insert a picture in SNS (Like Facebook), the system will hint the users to shot a photo and upload it. After choosing this option, you can use the “left” & “right” button to adjust the resolution, or switch to the front camera if you have one.

Brief Sum-Up: Picture Sharing Function has a high practicability in the internet, which is full of community and SNS sites. Maybe, in the next version of UC Browser, there will be a Location Sharing Function, who knows? But I really hope UC Browser could work on this.

4. Personalized Themes Makes Life Colorful.

The personalized themes are the biggest difference between old version and new version. In the old version of UC Browser, it carried 6 theme and in UC 7.2 just 2 pre-defined themes. However, what makes me surprised is UC 7.2 supports themes downloads, and UC officially provided 9 themes in total. I downloaded 2 themes, and after clicking the “Theme Download”, the system will redirect you to the UC download page, and it will take you only 4 seconds to

download per each. After the installation, the interface of UC Browser will change automatically very fast.

Brief Sum-up: We can anticipate that the UC Browser 7.2 Personalized Themes Function will allow users to design its own themes. I compared this function to Opera Mini, and find that Opera Mini still adopted the embedded interface, which is lack of personalization.

5. Flash 10 Support

Maybe Steven Jobs, the CEO of Apple, can’t imagine that when he is still quarreling with Adobe for the Flash, UC Browser from China has already released the new version to fully support Flash 10 technology to serve its 100 million users. The new version is already ready for Chinese, and not later in the future, I think UC Browser will also bring it to the International Version. With Flash 10 support, users can play community games with the same experience as what they have in PC.

Summary:

According to the “Mobile Internet Research Report” from Morgan Stanley: Mobile Internet will grow faster than PC Internet, and the scope will be out of the imagine of most of the people, because it represents the convergence of 5 major trends:

3G+SNS+Video+Internet Call + Handsets. Obviously, UC 7.2 takes 2 of these 5 keywords, which are SNS and 3G. From the function sides, I felt a lot surprise, including the entertainment, personalization, speed and operation. To be objectively, compare to the previous versions, UC Browser 7.2 made a big progress.