The latest beta of the Android-friendly version of Opera’s mobile web browser, Opera Mini 5, with versions hitting for BlackBerry and Windows Mobile too.

It looks nice and crowde, just like other mobile browsers

Cnet’s Crave blog for all things gadget-centric points out that, for those who’ve been using Opera Mini 4.2 on Android, the upgrade to Opera Mini 5 will be a welcome one, particularly for Android users, many of whom have made some fairly unsatisfied noise about the state of the bundled Browser on Android devices. While there are other options out there, including the constantly in flux but often impressive Dolphin browser, the fact is that those other options lack the pedigree of Opera’s mobile efforts.

For those coming from older versions of Opera for Android the changes should make themselves felt fairly quickly. Indeed, the entire interface has been overhauled, introducing a new version of Opera’s Speed Dial (a feature that’s been gradually leaking its way into other major browsers, like Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome). Indeed, this may well all seem just a bit familiar for anyone who’s been keeping an eye on Opera’s development on Windows Mobile and Symbian, that’s because effectively, Opera Mini 5 amounts to something very close to the Opera Mobile 10 we’ve seen on those platforms.

Of course, there’s no telling just when we’ll start to see some early versions of Firefox’s mobile efforts start to appear for Android, Windows Mobile and friends, though for the moment it seems to be confined to Nokia. Once it does start to emerge, it seems as though Opera could well have a bit of a fight on its hands in the mobile space, one area in which it’s reigned largely unchallenged for quite some time indeed.

While Opera’s practical ubiquity when it comes to the mobile market could see it very well positioned indeed, the fact is that Firefox didn’t become the number two browser in the desktop space for nothing, and those users are fairly likely to decide it’d be worth their while to pick up Firefox Mobile (or Pocketfox as some have called it) and take it for a test drive…

If you’d like to pick up Opera Mini 5 for Android then you can check it out by browsing to this link from your phone.