Over the past few months, I’ve been trying out various versions of Opera Mini 4 for mobile browsing. I had at least two beta versions, all of which installed and worked fine on my BlackBerry. Granted, there was a problem actually starting the install the first time, but I figured this out with a web search. And of course, beta software is usually rather buggy, and the later beta copies included a fix for that early problem.

With this in mind, I was excited to hear that Opera Mini 4 had finished with beta testing, and is now a final release. I dutifully erased my old copies, downloaded the new one, and launched the program. After granting it network access when prompted, I expected to start browsing and checking out the new features. Instead, I was greeted with a network error, and the program said to go the Opera website for troubleshooting. The only option was to “Exit”. So I exited, removed the program from my handheld, and just gave up.

What’s my point here? In short, if you’ve managed to deliver a high-quality experience during your testing or beta phase, it’s even more important to ensure this carries over to your official release. Always re-test the popular uses of the product, make sure the old bugs from the beta phase remain solved, and even ask some beta testers to give your “release candidate” a try before you send it out to the wild.

With so many products carrying the “beta” label for months or years, saying something is “final” confers a lot of confidence in the product. I don’t know what sort of testing or quality assurance work Opera does for each new version, but something clearly got overlooked here. And since user expectations were set high based on the pre-release versions, these sort of mishaps in the final product hurt the company and its users that much more.